Jekyll & Hyde of Greenwich Village: A 5 Course Review
P.S. Why is everything sticky?
First Course:
$95 Groupon + tax + gratuities is what it cost to find a place I’ll never return to. We had reservations for 4 at 7pm on Saturday, October 12th. The Groupon included 4 drinks, 2 appetizers, 4 entrees, 1 sticky table,15 kids screaming and running around with no apparent adult supervision, a hidden bookshelf bathroom which seemed to piss off old men more than help them pee, a thermostat that only understood MORE HEAT, and an actor with a bad accent telling our table we were too stupid to understand what he was saying.
Second Course:
When we got there, a few minutes before 7, they said we would need to wait for our table to be ready. We asked the normal, “how long do you think?” and a man walked away while saying, “I don’t know, as long as it takes people to finish eating.” Which immediately made me want to start a fire.
So, before even getting to our table, we had a rude man tell us that they had no idea how long it would take for us to get our “reserved” table. Then, within a few minutes, there were 4 open tables and we were sat. I can only assume some kind of black magic was present.
After sitting down, we all noticed that the table was sticky. We’re not talking about a, did they wipe this down after the last meal sticky, more like, was this table recently covered in honey?
Throughout the restaurant, people were talking, eating, and sending their kids to the daycare upstairs. I’m not actually sure if there was a daycare upstairs, but the kids screaming and running past our table up the stairs every few minutes leads me to believe there was something drawing them up there. Then it hit me, maybe before we got there, the children were tasked to clean the sticky tables and they licked it off causing a sugar high! It’s the only reasonable explanation.
It was also 80 degrees and the wait staff was drenched in sweat.
Third Course:
After a few minutes, we ordered our drinks and appetizers. They were out of what we actually wanted (SHRIMPS), but our second choice was alright and other than the table gripping onto our skin every time we touched it, everything seemed to be looking up.
The table next to us was seated and since we were directly on top of each other, we overheard that they too were there on a Groupon. I wondered if their table was sticky or if they would have ever come to the restaurant without a Groupon.
Through the hallway the kids kept running through, I had a direct view of the bathrooms. They were hidden behind a wall of fake books. Which, although pretty cool, only seemed to confuse most of the older men searching for them. Every few minutes someone would walk past us, touch along the wall, walk back out to us, then turn around to eventually find the bathroom. I for one was sad for them and could only imagine that the confusion made the room even hotter for them.
Speaking of which, the heat was still sweltering and we asked a waiter, who looked to be preparing to pass out, if he could turn the AC on, which he said he would.
The drinks arrived! Sweet redemption! But not. A normally priced $9.50 drink should be big and delicious, right? They were small and mediocre. Side note; why is the table sticky?
The cheese sticks were out of a box, but the beef nachos weren’t too bad, really. Habaneros, meat, cheese, salsa, sour cream, and heated up in a stove so the chips were extra crispy. Well played, Jekyll & Hyde.
Fourth Course:
Order time! Before I even walked through the door I knew that I wanted the NY Strip Steak. I thought about it all day. You know the steak I’m talking about. You use a butter knife to cut it, not because you don’t have a steak knife, but because it slides straight through. The inside is the kind of pink that makes you re-evaluate the choices in your life so that you could afford more steaks like the one before you. The blood sits quietly under fresh mashed potatoes like a reminder that this is the flesh of an animal and it is beautiful…
Everyone told me to order first, and I did so quickly, letting the daydream continue until lifting my hands off the table, “WHY IS THE TABLE STICKY?” I screamed in my head.
I’m pretty sure the air had been turned on, but from the inner rage about the sticky issue, I couldn’t tell.
Then, when the three people at the table asked questions about the menu items the waitress repeatedly said, “yeah, I wouldn’t order that,” in a way that made me doubt the majestic meat I had tip-toeing through my brain.
Fifth Course:
I’m going to consider ordering the food the “fourth course,” because it took that long. The table next to us sat down, ordered, and already received their dinner when our waitress came over and asked, “can you tell me what each of you ordered? I’m going to go pick it up in the kitchen and bring it out,” which is code for, “we forgot to put your order in.”
Between ordering a second time and receiving our food a chubby guy in a vest came to the table and told us a story of when he was born, when he died, and how stupid we were for not knowing something or other about a replication machine or something. His accent was horrible and for some reason he was sweaty…
10 or so minutes later, the food (and I’m using the term loosely) arrived.
Steak = Cooked Medium
Potatoes = Mediocre
Waitress = Disappeared
Table = Sticky
Air = Hot
I had a few bites of the nasty lil’ steak. Finished the potatoes. Waitress never came back and we asked the sweaty waiter from earlier if we could have the check.
In walked the old waitress. But after most likely understanding that her tip was going to be less than favorable, never came back to the table to ask why I didn’t eat the steak or if we ever wanted refills on our $9.50 drinks or our waters.
The bill, after the Groupon, came out to be $9.18.
We left a $20 bill on the honey-saturated table, tipping $10.82 too much and left.
Jason Donnelly, author of Gripped: Your Personality is What’s Holding You Back
