Wilma's — Restaurant in Wilmington

So I had the worst restaurant service experience I've had in a long time yesterday!

A couple of friends and I went to Wilma's, in Wilmington, which serves pretty pricey Cajun/New Orleans food and drinks, and also contains four lanes of duckpin bowling. (I had never duckpin bowled before, and that part was actually fun.)

What wasn't fun was:

(1) The restaurant and the bowling lanes were in the same physical space. They weren't in separate rooms, and while the lanes themselves were noisy, the worst were the two or three 20-something girls screaming their heads off, which, it turns out, is not a great environment for eating dinner. Whoever answered the question, "hey, do you think it might be too noisy for a good sit down restaurant experience with a bowling alley in the same room" with "nah, I'm sure it will be fine!" should never be allowed to work again.

(2) We ordered our drinks, appetizers and main courses all at the same time. Apparently, we should have told them that we wanted our drinks, and then our apps, and then our entrees to come out each spaced at least a few minutes apart, because that's absolutely not what we got. All of the food got delivered to our table, and then I noted for our waiter that I believe those are our drinks on the bar waiting to be picked up and delivered to us. So, we got all of our food first, and then our drinks. 🤦‍♂️(Had I not mentioned the drinks we may have made it through our meal without ever receiving them.)

(3) Two of our three drinks were fine, but the third was abhorrent. The bartender should be ashamed.

(4) But none of us had the opportunity to order another drink because the waiter never returned once after dropping off our food.

(5) Upon finishing our food, we waited for about ten minutes before one of my friends went to the bowling alley attendee to say "what the $#@&?" About ten minutes after that, said bowling alley attendee walked by us and we practically begged her to give us our check and boxes so we could get to bowling.

(6) This place charges an automatic 20% gratuity on all checks. I wasn't having that. I calmly, but not without some intensity, explained to the bowling alley attendee that based on what had happened, paying 20% in gratuity "hurts," and she took it off the bill. That was the highlight of our service experience: not being automatically charged a 20% gratuity.

Hope you appreciated that saga!

(The food was generally alright. Sort of mid. Would probably give the food 3.5 stars, but rounded it down to 3 stars because it was literally less enjoyable due to the atmosphere...

I went to Wilma’s with a friend on a week night so try the duckpin bowling. We parked in the lot that’s listed on the website but when trying to use the coupon code it didn’t work. We were instructed by the hostess to end the parking session and restart the parking with the code, but it still didn’t work. When the manager was called over he admitted they’ve been having problems with it working but he didn’t have a solution. So we had to walk back to the parking garage to rescan the QR code and ended up paying for parking twice when we had to restart it. Then when we finally started bowling we saw that they started our 1 hour bowling timer while we walked back to the parking garage. So now we only had 45 minutes to bowl. Eventually they did agree to restart the timer. We then asked for menus to order food and drinks. After 20 minutes no one had come by to take our orders and the server who was bringing food to the group next to us seemed to be trying to ignore us. We eventually went to the bar to try and order but were told that someone would be over to our lane to take our order. Someone finally did come over and took our drink order but said she’d be back for food orders. Our drinks appeared while we were bowling but the server didn’t alert us to ask for food orders. We then didn’t see her again for our entire time there until an hour later when we were almost done bowling. At this point I didn’t want to give this place anymore money, especially considering the bowling lane we were using broke multiple times while we were playing. The manager did come over without prompting, saying he heard we’d had a rough experience, and offered us 15% off which is whatever because we only ordered 2 drinks. But at the end there was a 20% automatic gratuity added. Which would normally be fine but my thought was, who am I tipping?

Long story short, duckpin bowling is a fun idea and the place is aesthetically cute but I don’t think I could recommend Wilma’s to anyone due to poor service and frequent bowling lane...

As French culinary art trained Creole and Cajun chefs, both my wife and I read about Wilma's and wanted to give it a try. We got multiple dishes to share and try, we looked at posted photos that appeared very appetizing but let me share our experience: atmosphere and customer service were 5 star, now for the food and how the owners are choosing to run their establishment; we ate there with a 5 pm reservation in which we saw there were some happy hour food prices that you could not get unless you sat at the bar (of which the seating was very limited). Never been to any eating establishment that designates you to have to sit at the bar to receive happy hour food prices. We started with a bowl of gumbo and jambalaya, jambalaya was absolutely perfect and spot on. The gumbo however was bland and had absolutely no flavor (horrible for gumbo), we had the shrimp and grits (grits appeared to be white grits, and the shrimp and grits were all spice with none of the flavors of the vegetable gravy, shrimp, or anything else), very disappointing. We ordered a 3 course dinner in which the fresh mozzarella salad was delicious (hard to mess that up), the flank steak was thin sliced like ribeye cheesesteak meat with very little flavor, and the grasshopper ice cream pie , which was very good. Now to the check, this establishment automatically includes a 20% tip to the bill. I understand that waitresses and waiters make very little money and depend on tips, and some people won't tip no matter how good the service or food is. I however don't agree with the automatic 20 % tip based on the fact that what if the food isn't great or the service was horrible, then I'm forced to tip on bad food and service, don't agree with this. Food needs a lot of work if you are going to call this traditional Cajun and Creole, we probably won't return for...