Today we went to the Spaghetti Warehouse in Tulsa, Ok.
Church went a little long today and afterwards by the time we got around rummaging through our various coupons we decided on Spaghetti Warehouse, it was not an easy choice to come to as we have had bad experiences there before with the service and the taste. But today is a new day and we must have been feeling a little brave…so onward to Spaghetti! We arrived at a quarter to 1 p.m. we were too late in the parking lot to race ahead of the family of 10 and we just knew we were going to be waiting for hours for a table. Luckily, we had just left church or we may have tried to outrun them to the door, to our delight we were seated immediately. But alas that is where our happiness in today’s experiment came to an utter and devastating crash.
It began with the wait, now seven minutes is not an awful long time in the grand scheme of things but far too often it does set a dreadful tone for the rest of the experience. Being experienced in the field of casual dining, once we had our waiter we knew better than to simply order our drinks and wait for his return to place our meal order, so we ordered. Bethany ordered the Spaghetti with Chicken and Wild Mushrooms and Johnny ordered the Chicken Florentine. In a couple of minutes we had our salads, if you could call them salads…more like yard work with some very lame excuses for tomatoes casually tossed in the bowls with one ring of onion. One bowl had crutons and one didnt…which actually worked out for one of us because the person who ended up with the crutons was disappointed with the staleness of the crutons. In 13 minutes our meals arrived along with the bread and all of which was hot and unfortunately that is the end of the pleasantries as far as the meal was concerned. Bethany’s inital comment was that her meal smelled awful and from Johnny’s seat it was not a pleasant aroma wafting off her plate. Also visually her meal looked nothing like the picture features in the menu. Johnny’s meal was less offensive the smell was not pungent nor was there any pictures to compare the actual rendering to and see how short the meal fell. After a few minutes Bethany could take her meal no longer and Johnny went off to the waiter to lodge a complaint…after a brief educational chat from our waiter about his kitchen knowledge and the meal “being more of a Mushroom flavored sauce and not having Mushrooms in the dish” he conceded and brought back more “mushroom flavored sauce”.
During our whole experience our waiter was thorough and polite but it did little to make up for the lack of taste of our dinner, however he was offended when Bethany told him her dish tasted like they opened a jar of Ragu sauce…the waiter assured us the meal was made from scratch and proceeded to off to replace the meal at no charge. Being brave again she opted for the spaghetti with marinara sauce…..wasnt as bad as previous dish but still lacked the quality you would expect from a restaurant named Spaghetti Warehouse.
Conclusions: If you want a nice atmosphere (just don’t look out the window) and friendly staff for a group or family get together, and you can find something on the menu you can enjoy then Spaghetti Warehouse is for you. If someone can recommend an entree on the menu to us we will be willing to try again but if what we had is a typical choice then we will pass.
