Washington, DC's Smith & Wollensky = Good Food & Bad Service

The Smith & Wollensky located in Washington, DC is on 19th Street, between L&M, in the Northwest quadrant of the city. It's right near my alma mater, The George Washington University. As a matter of fact, it is next door to the best Italian place in DC (called Luigi's), where I used to go all throughout college.

As you enter the building, there is outdoor seating -- even in early March. I don't know if the area is heated or what, but people were being served their dinner on the very cold night that we went. We went right to the maitre'd and gave our name for our 8:30 reservation. We were told that it was going to be a 20 minute wait or so. Of course, this did NOT make me happy. If you turn up for a reservation 20 minutes later than the time you reserved, chances are your table is given to someone else. But, we were right on time, and we still had to wait. Not cool.

I checked my coat, and we waited in the lobby rather than sitting at one of the two bars. When I made the reservation, I specifies that we didn't want to sit directly next to another party. We hate sitting in restaurants where you can look to your side and have an intimate conversation with the person next to you. When the hostess walked us to our table, it was exactly the kind of table that we hate sitting at. I told her so, and we were brought back to the lobby to wait another 10 minutes.

At 9:00, we were seated on an upper level near another bar, a very noisy area indeed. It was definitely not the kind of setting we had hoped foor. With our recent experiences at Ruth's Chris and Morton's, we were looking for a similar experience. No such luck.

The service was truly horrible. Maybe it's because we're from New York and expect things to be served quickly. The waitress didn't come to our table to take our drink order for at least 10 minutes, then took another 10 minutes to bring it out. After sitting at the table for nearly 40 minutes, the Caesar Salad we ordered finally arrived.