India House - a negative experience. (Very long.)

Allow me to preface this review with a couple comments.

I'm understanding to a fault when it's apparent that a server is busy, having a bad night, having problems with the kitchen - any number of reasons. I'm really more than willing to give them the benefit of the doubt up until they give me reason not to do so. (And if a mistake is made, if it's quickly and courteously corrected I'm not one to hold a grudge.) The above applies even moreso when I'm with a large group, I'm well aware of the hassle it can involve to handle a big group. (There were sixteen of us in total.)

I'm also not one to rush through meals. I generally won't go to a restaurant if time is really of a major concern, but there is a point where it just becomes ridiculous.

Even taking into account the points listed above, I can't really see myself ever returning to India House.

I'll start by saying it wasn't my pick of restaurants. I'd heartily endorsed Bhabi's Kitchen at first when the discussion was brought up- but as the group size swelled above 15, it became apparent we'd be a bit too much for the Syed family to handle. (Especially on a Saturday night.) Adding in the fact that our party absolutely required a full bar and we wanted to be in the loop, India House rapidly became the pick. (I generally avoid dining on ethnic food in the loop. I just find that too many of the loop locations cater to tourists and have much higher prices due to their higher rent.)

I'll start with the one thing they did get right - reservations didn't seem too rough, and they gave us our own section that was mostly private. (And pretty near to the bar luckily, but that came in later.)

I arrived late to meet with our group due to a prior engagement - they'd been seated for about forty-five minutes at that point. They still hadn't gotten menus. When we asked for menus the waiter gave us a rather glazed look and asked how many. (Apparently he assumed we might just want to share them? I don't know.) We placed some drink orders at this point as well.

Time passed, busboys refilled our water. We made lighthearted jokes about seeing our waiter again.

About thirty minutes later we saw our waiter again, I think someone at the other table in our group (the group was seated at two tables, one of ten people and another with six) tracked down a staff member and asked them to come upstairs and see us. At this point a friend at my table (the table of six) made a brilliant decision - she asked if it'd be possible to split the check so it'd be one check per table. (A decision that saved us a great deal of headaches later.) Another friend asked about his drink that he'd ordered a half hour ago, and was served a martini in a margarita glass a few minutes later. I decided to forgo anything from the bar at that point and stick to my water.

Meanwhile I heard some commotion from the other table, and wandered over to talk to friends there. Apparently the waiter kept getting drink orders wrong (or simply not bringing them at all), and blaming it on the bartender. (Using some less than kind language in doing so.) My friends guessed it might have been a language barrier issue, so they went directly to the bar. A friend reported that he'd separated the bartender and waiter from fighting - I'm not sure how great of an exaggeration that was. From then on, everyone just went to the bar for drinks - the bartender was sympathetic. (And made it clear that the language barrier was a source of many headaches - things like "chambord and belvedere" sound a lot like "cranberry and belvedere" in a loud restaurant to a non-native English speaker.)

And then came the actual process of ordering. Each menu item is numbered for some reason, in addition to having a name. A friend who's well versed (much moreso than myself) in Indian cuisine figured she could just make it easy by giving the number - no dice. He didn't know what that meant, so she gave the order again - chicken biryani. He asked if she'd like rice with it - she informed him that it was a rice dish. He seemed to take offense to the correction. (Tempers were beginning to flare at this point, it'd been well over an hour and we were finally ordering.)

From that point on until the food arrived was pretty uneventful, save for my friends getting to know the bartender, and our waiters being generally scarce.

The food arrived and everyone at our table shared. I was able to sample samosas, palak paneer, gosht chili somethingorother ("spicy" lamb with chiles in a sauce), garlic naan, poori, saffron rice, and a few other things. It was reasonably passable food but Bhabi's has ruined me - it seemed generally greasy, lacking the depth of flavor that I'm accustomed to, and dumbed-down in terms of spice for the tourists and whatnot. It was pretty much what I expected, and about twice as much on average as I'd pay for larger portions at Bhabi's.

So far it'd been a pretty lousy dinner, but our friends at the other table were at least able to get a deduction from their bill after speaking with a manager. (And the poor girl with the chicken biryani? They didn't even bring it out until 20 minutes after everyone else was done eating. They tried to pass her saffron rice at first and she had to complain twice to get them to even try and remedy the situation.) It wasn't until the bill finally came that all hell really broke loose.

It started with the waiter delivering the check and knocking a full drink into a friend's lap in the process, and got worse from there.

All along the drinks we'd ordered and never received? They were all on the bill. In addition there was some creative drink pricing - a belvedere cosmo was billed once for a cosmo and then again as an order of "belvedere" - in essence double-billing for a single drink. They also had billed any drinks including Jack Daniel's in them at the rate for Single-Barrel Jack, and any drink orders that were incorrect and had to be sent back to receive the proper drink? We were billed for both the initial bad drink, and the second corrected one.

Somewhat luckily for our smaller table of six, they'd put every drink order on the larger table of ten's bill. Management had to be summoned again and the forty-five minute process of trying to settle the bill began. We ended up closing our smaller table's tab and working with the larger table to account for our drinks that'd been placed on their bill. (I was glad my only drink order had been for a coke that I'd never received.) In the end people were called up to the bar one by one to recount what they'd ordered with management and the bartender, and drinks were crossed off of the bill line by line.

I finally just walked out around 11:30. (The reservation was for 8.) My bill had been paid and I was sick of dealing with the mess, and the group was incredibly annoyed at that point. It left a pretty sour note on the evening that should have been a pleasant birthday celebration.

I wouldn't recommend taking a large group to India House.

Jesus. Did the waiter finally pull off his mask to reveal that he's really Allen Funt or Ashton Kutcher? The whole experience sounds like an episode of Punjabi Punk'd. Maybe if they would have billed you for the chicken and the biriyani . . .

Rebbe