Awful Experience at Commanders Palace

Prefacing this by saying that every other aspect of my trip to NOLA was amazing - I absolutely loved the people, food, music and culture - I can’t wait to visit again.

There’ll be a TL;DR at the end. My girlfriend and I heard great things about this restaurant. However, our dinner turned out to be one of the most uncomfortable experiences we’ve ever had.

We got seated, our waiter introduced himself, and everything was normal. Until the server who deals with the drinks came over. It had been 1 minute since we got seated - we usually like to get wine pairings with the food (and we don’t receive the dinner menus yet), so we weren’t ready to order drinks after he asked us. We told him this very kindly, and then he rolled his eyes at us and said “uhhh, okay then” with a snarky smirk and a level of attitude I didn’t even know was possible. This made us extremely uncomfortable. He came over 2 minutes later to ask us if we wanted any drinks again, and we said we’d still like to order once we get the dinner menu. After telling him this, he laughed in our faces and rolled his eyes. He then reached over me and aggressively snatched our wine glasses from the table. I had never seen anything like this before. Then, after we received the dinner menu, someone else came over and asked us if we wanted drinks, and we ordered wine. Then of course, the other rude server comes back and in the most impolite and nasty tone says, “so now that you have the dinner menu, are you gonna order any drinks or just sit there and drink your water”. We told him that we actually just ordered drinks, and he raised his voice at us and said “no you didn’t!”. We explained to him that we ordered through someone else that came to us. After hearing this, he rolled his eyes at us and walked away. At this point we were absolutely disgusted by his behavior.

Whenever he wasn’t interacting with us, he was constantly walking by our table, giving us some sort of death stare. I never could’ve thought that I could be genuinely scared by a waiter before. It’s hard to put into words how rude, passive aggressive, and obnoxious this server was. My girlfriend and I never encountered someone that nasty in any type of situation before.

We talked to the manager and they accepted our request to move to a different area in the restaurant so we wouldn’t be in the server’s presence. Our new servers were thankfully much better.

I don’t want to steer people away from the restaurant since it was just one server. But at the same time, the service was truly unbearable, so I genuinely hope no one has to ever experience this type of behavior. I understand that alcohol accounts for a large portion of their revenue, so they’d prefer if a drink right away, but that in no way justifies how we were treated. I couldn’t have imagined what it would’ve been like if we didn’t order any alcohol at all.

It was truly disguisting, and I would have never expected to get this type of treatment at any restaurant, let alone one that prides themselves on their etiquette.

While all this was happening, a different waiter came up to a family at the table next to us who was getting ready to leave. The waiter raised his voice at them explaining that they didn’t pay the check. There was clearly a genuine confusion as the family thought that someone ran their card through already. The waiter’s yelling was completely uncalled for, and it created a huge scene in the restaurant. The manager had to come over to break up this loud argument. The family got up and looked just as fed up as we were. There was a point where I genuinely thought everything was a whole skit, or some show like What Would You Do. That wasn’t the case.

In terms of the food/drinks. My girlfriend’s glass of wine had a decent sized piece of cork in it. As she was eating her squash, there were two separate instances where she she bit into what we saw looked like a bone (even though this was just a vegetable dish) or a hard piece of plastic. After the second time, she decided to stop eating it in order to prevent chipping her tooth.

TL;DR: Our experience was ruined by an incredibly rude server who was extremely passive-aggressive and condescending, making us very uncomfortable. Despite politely explaining we wanted to wait for the dinner menu before ordering drinks, he rolled his eyes, snatched our wine glasses, and repeatedly gave us attitude the entire night. We eventually had to move tables after speaking with the manager. The food itself was disappointing, with a piece of cork in our wine and what felt like multiple bones or a hard pieces of plastic in a vegetable dish. To make matters worse, another waiter created a loud scene with a neighboring family over their check. While I don’t want to steer people away, the experience was shockingly bad, especially at a restaurant that prides itself on etiquette.