Good help is so hard to find.
Literally.
Our waitress was missing for 90% of our meal today at Canoe, an otherwise adorable Atlanta restaurant on Paces Ferry.
I mean check it out:
Beautiful, right?
Canoe is located on the Chattahoochee River. On a completely unrelated note, there were girls in high school we called chattahoochees (or hoochie mamas) because they wore midrifts with bellybuttons popping out, hoop earrings, and gold necklaces with their names on them. In other words, I went to high school with Sarah Jessica Parker.
Here is our lovely view of the bridge:
Looks like something out of Fried Green Tomatoes. Except in that movie, the service was amicable and alert—who cares if they serve you human ribs as long as they serve you?
Our waitress wasn’t a bad person. She was just aloof. Majorly aloof. We ordered drinks. She didn’t bring them. We asked for bread. She gave it to the next table. People sat down thirty minutes after us and were on their entrees before we got our appetizers. Our waitress sucked.
But the food was pretty good. We had been there once before and the food was better. That time was Sunday brunch and I really enjoyed their brunch food.
Today I started with the aloof waitress’s recommendation of chilled artichoke soup:
A nice presentation, sure. That’s basil in there. The soup was light and refreshing but not my favorite.
My dad definitely picked the winner. A smoked salmon appetizer that mom and I finnagled dad for a taste of:
It was fantastic. The best part of the meal, and I only had a small taste.
Mom’s onion soup is not pictured because I deemed it unimpressive.
As for entrees I had the crab cake salad:
This was a disappointment. The inside of the crabcake was overly mayonaissey and mostly flavorless. The citrus salad dressing left me unenthused.
Mom had a tuna salad that I also didn’t care for:
Dad, yet again, picked the best—a rock shrimp salad:
Everything was fried, true. But it looked the most interesting and tasty. I picked off his plate.
Here’s mom and dad with the lovely background:
I would tell you how the meal ended, but we’re still here. The waitress hasn’t brought the check. Any day now.
I am completely hooked on your blog! And your parents are the cutest things!!
I came thru eGullet which I just found out about last week.
I am now absolutely hooked on your blog. Thanks for sharing your moments with us.
Canoe, like so many high-end resturants in Atlanta, is overated. The food’s quality varies a great deal from visit to visit. I went there three times between 1999-2000. While my meals were good, it didn’t meet my expectations. (If you do go to Canoe, you must sit outside. That’s one of its redeeming qualities; the setting on the river is very nice.)
At least the food was always better than the service. During my visits there the servers wore blue jeans and white dress shirts. True, jeans don’t make the person, but jeans are a bit too casual for my liking in this type of environment.
I also felt that the servers were constantly bothering me and my guests, especially my parents. I thought my dad was going to blow his lid when the guy came around with the crumb collector. We had been trying to have a pleasant family conversation throughout our meal, but the waiter constantly came up every few minutes and asked us questions or interupted our conversation in some other way. I enjoy being in an environment where I know the servers are attentive, but my philosophy on service in a resturant is the more attentive and out of sight it is the better. At Canoe, I felt more like I was trapped in a canoe with my waiter rather than feeling like I was at a nice resturant having a nice meal with good service.