TGI Friday's

Herndon, VA

(Note: The normal Tinotopia restaurant review guidelines do not apply here: read on to find out why.)

TGI Friday's is an international chain of restaurants that, on its website, bills itself as "America's first casual dining chain", and "a dining experience that has become the favorite pastime of millions since 1965."

If that's truly the case, then I need to start attracting investors for my idea: a chain of places where people come in and pay me $20 to whack them in the shins with an old tomato stake for a half-hour. That might even top the fun you can have at Friday's.

I think I'll start this review with a picture:

Uh-oh. Doesn't look good, does it? Any time you walk out of a restaurant with the GM's business card with a free meal voucher written on the back, you know things have got wiggly. When the voucher explicitly includes appetizers and desserts, you know they've got very wiggly indeed.

Well, it was a wiggly experience at Friday's the other day. Ed and I went there for lunch. It would be nice for a change to have someone bring us food, instead of having to wait in line at a counter.

I was a bit trepidatious, because of my previous experience with this particular Friday's. Here's another picture:

This is from my last visit to this restaurant, a few months ago. (Note that the place had a different General Manager then.) This one didn't earn me a free meal, just an "A+" on the back of the card; I was told to show this to my server on my next visit, which would allegedly get me better service.

Let me make this clear: the policy for customers who'd got lousy service was to give them a card that would entitle them to good service in the future. Logically, we may assume that if the disgruntled customer did not show this card on his next visit, there was no particular hope on the part of the manager that the service would be any better.

I always thought this was pretty cynical, and I never redeemed the cards. I have three of them, all from Edward C. "Ted" Toole III.

Anyway, back to the visit that is the subject of this review. We went there for lunch, at about 12:30. Apparently the word has spread about this restaurant: at 12:30, most restaurants in the Reston-Herndustrial Complex have lines out the door. At Friday's, most of the tables were empty.

We were seated promptly, and a waiter showed up to take our order. We ordered drinks and normal lunch-type food.

I ordered a Gardenburger and fries. I particularly pointed out that I wanted lettuce, pickles, tomato, etc. The second-last time I was there and ordered a Gardenburger, I got none of that, and was told by the waiter that I had to explicitly request those things.

(The last time I was there, I requested them, and was told that they automatically came with the burger; when I said that that contradicted what I'd been told the last time, I was told that the previous waiter had been wrong, and that the condiments were part of the set dish. When the burger came out, though -- despite them (allegedly) being a default part of the dish and my having explicitly requested them -- I had no lettuce, tomato, pickles, etc. Go figure.)

Anyway, we placed our orders and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, after about 30 minutes, we flagged down the waiter -- our drinks were empty anyway. I told him that we weren't particularly upset about the delay -- we were on the clock, so to speak -- but that I had a meeting at 1:30 (It was now almost 1 pm, remember), and that if our food didn't show up in the next minute, I needed to see a manager because I wasn't going to have time to eat anything.

About five minutes later, the manager -- David Tilley, whose business card appears at the top of this page -- showed up. I explained the situation to him, and pointed out that, in my experience, this kind of service was par for the course at this particular Friday's.

He introduced himself as the new general manager, having been there only ten days -- note that he doesn't even have business cards printed up yet -- and mentioned that mine was not the first complaint of this kind he'd heard.

He then proceeded to explain that the problem was that the waiter has neglected to submit our order to the kitchen at all.

I have to give David Tilley credit, though. This was the first time I've complained about absurdly bad service at this particular Friday's and not been told that they had problems finding staff, or that a bunch of people hadn't shown up that day, or some such B.S. -- instead, he just apologized, and said it was inexcusable.

When I start getting the story about how hard it is to run a restaurant these days, my impulse is to stand on the table and start yelling, "This is not my problem! I do not run this restaurant! You (ostensibly) do! Stop trying to make this my problem!" I am good at making parenthetical remarks whilst shouting.

I once even remarked that Bertucci's -- the chain restaurant across the street -- didn't seem to have problems getting enough staff to stay open, and was told (by "Ted" Toole, business card above) that Bertucci's was a very different kind of operation, etc., etc.

Anyway. I wound up leaving with Tilley's business card in my pocket, and we went to McDonald's. I felt angry for the rest of the afternoon: not just because Friday's had stolen 40 minutes of my life, but because I'd felt marketed to.

You know the feeling: you get it when you go to the movie with the great trailer, only to discover that it sucks. Or when you buy a CD and find that every single song on it, other than the singular song that's played on the radio, sounds like a washing machine full of rocks. You feel taken advantage of, and you feel like a sucker.

Well, somewhere at the base of Friday's marketing message, beneath all the crap about the Jack Daniel's Ribs and the good-time food-drinkery image nonsense, is this simple statement: Come to Friday's and pay us money, and you can eat food.

And I was suckered into believing it. Instead, the CD was 74 minutes of silence. The apology at the end does not make it any less horrible.

My conclusion, my message to the Friday's people, is this: shut the hell down. If you cannot operate a chain restaurant in Northern Virginia -- where all restaurants are chains, and where everyone has too much money -- you have truly failed. If you cannot pull this off, just give up, close the place down, and give someone else a chance. All you are doing is pissing off would-be customers, wasting your stockholders' money, and taking up space in my town, space that could be better used by someone who could actually begin to deliver on the implicit promises that a business makes.