If you get a waitress named Nan, ask for a new server.
Our party of six was seated quickly with a wonderful view of the water. The problems began when we had been admiring our wonderful view for 10 minutes before anyone bothered to ask us what we wanted to drink. Another 10 minutes passed before the drinks came out (and no, none of them were alcoholic), and one of them had been forgotten. That member of our party finally had to ask a busboy to get her a drink because the waitress didn't bring her one until after our appetizer had arrived and been half-eaten. While we were waiting for that drink and refills on all of our other drinks, we could clearly see Nan lollygagging about the restaurant, talking with the other servers, and all-around avoiding her tables.
Our food came out before our salads, which is when we really started to get furious. In our party of six, everybody except one agreed that the food was quite good, but we were all pretty angry that we had been charged for salads that we weren't going to be eating since we had our entrees by this point. When Nan finally asked us if we needed anything else - and yes, we did need some other stuff, including drink refills, tartar sauce, and more napkins, but she didn't come back until we were done eating and all of this was obsolete - I asked for a discount because of the salads not coming out before our food. I didn't mention her terrible service at this point. After fifteen minutes of nothing, a manager brought us a to-go box and told us he'd be glad to get us a free dessert. We told him no - we were all full at this point and just ready to get out of there. He was gone for another TWENTY minutes before coming back to offer me a free meal while expecting all of my friends to pay retail for theirs, although they too never got refills on their drinks or their salads before their meals, either. At this point I was really becoming irrate and he finally gave us all half-off dinners, but he definitely wasted a lot of our time before finally giving us this offer. He clearly didn't know much about customer service - when you have an unhappy customer, you should fix it as quickly as possible instead of wasting their time and making them more angry.
All in all, the view was lovely and the restaurant quaint, and in the restaurant's defense it did seem like many other people were quite pleased with their service. We just weren't lucky enough to be those people. No matter how good the food was, it wasn't special enough to go back to a place where we got treated so poorly.
