i love lugaru's description of "ninja" waiters. that is the best you can get, imo.
to me, the quality of food is first, then service, then ambience. i just hope the health dept. is doing their job so i don't have to worry about cleanliness. gb nailed it when he said he expects all three to be top notch in a high end place, but the food just has to be good in a dive.
i don't mind friendly waiters, but make sure my drink is full, and you've checked to see if there's anything else i need first. and if you want to sit down and chat, i'd better be getting something for free, like a drink or dessert. and if you screw up an order, friendly or not, i'd better be getting something comp'd as well. i will tip accordingly. usually too much.
this past year, my wife and i had a bad experience on our anniversary. we went to one of our all time favorite places near home, the south city grill, where we went at least once a month before the baby and dropped at least $125 every time, but now will not be going back again anytime soon. we noticed the entire staff had changed, to people that didn't have a clue or seem to care about the fact that this was their current job. we were seated, waited forever for a menu, then the first round of drinks, the for the waiter just to take the order. then, after eating dried out (pre-shucked hours before i guess) oysters, we waited some more, and then a different waiter told me that the entree i ordered was out, and i would need to select something else. i did, and ordered another round, and a little while later, our meals came, without drinks, and my wife's dish was cold, but she was so hungry she ate it. mine was seriously lacking the seafood that it was supposed to be made out of. mostly just pasta and a heavy cream sauce.
well, our second round of drinks never came, and after we finished our dinners, the original waiter ran over (i saw him watching a football game in the meantime) and asked if our dinners were ok and if we wanted dessert. before i could answer came the "friendly" routine. he started asking how old my son was, and commenting on how cute he is, and telling me his whole life plans on having kids. i felt like telling him to get a career he cared about first. i eventually got a word in, told him about the food and drinks, and he actually got a little snotty, then came a dozen excuses about how understaffed they were that day. i was gonna argue about the throng of waiters watching football at the bar, but what would have been the point? we tried to tell the airheaded hostess about it when we were leaving, but she was obviously just window dressing with an iq of a wet bag of manure, more interested in her nails and hair than customers.
well, to say the least, i'm not going back. dw went with a coupla friends for a birthday recently, and nothing has changed. she tried to warn her girlfriends, but they insisted on going there. now they are ex-customers as well.
fortunately for us, there are so many restaurants around that we could go to a different one every week for the rest of our lives and still not eat in them all.
(btw, if you are in nj, my advice is aviod the south city grill on route 17 south)