why

We ventured outside the perimeter last Friday night to see Silena's soul band. They were good, R&B, Sade, Chaka Khan, that kind of stuff. It was pretty cool and different than I'm used to.
Here's a little sample, from my digital happy snap camera.



The place was The Tasting Room in East Point. Apparently formerly owned by Atlanta's own Michael Vick. And to get to the point...

This. Place. Sucks.

Let me explain, The Tasting Room is the worst "restaurant" I have ever been to. I can't think of a place where the service was worse. I could describe it I guess, but really, it's nothing you haven't heard before. Not just surly, but incompetent, resentful, lazy staff who couldn't even be bothered to smile at you, brought you one thing at a time, with 15 minute breaks between each item, as in, here's some silverware... 15 minutes later, here's a napkin, 15 minutes, here's your wine, etc.

You'd think that a place would be happy to have so many people drawn to their restaurant by a band, but no. They wanted to charge a cover, depending on who you spoke to when coming in the door. The band got the rotten treatment too. It was all wanna-be style and zero substance. No class. But they wanted it so bad. Tacky AND generic. Blah food, bad wine, terrible service. I'm afraid the guy serving us tacked on an 18% "group" tip (there were two of us) like he did our friends. I didn't notice because I wanted to get the hell out of this place and am pissed at myself for it. It's like no one at this place has ever been to an authentic fancy restaurant. These people were not keeping it real. Not one bit. Empty. Blah. Rude. Actually, I can handle surly, not a problem. Incompetence and fakeness I have a harder time with.

It was kind of interesting to be two of four white people in the place, and at first I thought the rotten service might be some kind of racial thing. But it wasn't. We were there with maybe 30 black folks from work. They were also shocked at the total worthlessness of everything there.

Maybe judging all suburbs by this one experience is overreacting, but the whole night was kind of a bust. I felt like the cook from Apocalypse Now when he gets off the boat and meets the tiger. "Never go OTP" is my new motto.

So keep in mind when considering your dining options, The Tasting Room Sucks. Capital S. The sooner this place is gone, the better. Yes there are worse things in the world than a bad restaurant, but this place needs to stop pretending and be put out of its misery.