Restaurant Review: Wild Fork

Hello, hello! Happy Monday. After I move and get settled in, it’s my goal to blog a bit more. So hang in there with me. For your enjoyment:

Restaurant Review: The Wild Fork

I love the Wild Fork. I’ve been there a billion times. I love the artsy lighting in the restaurant, I love the menu and the wine list… yada yada. I especially love having breakfast outside on Saturday mornings. From a good table on the patio, you can see most of Tulsa’s hoi polloi on any given weekend. They bake their own sourdough, rye and raisin bread for toast, and I have a strong suspicion that they make their own strawberry jelly, too. Lastly, they have the yummiest, cheesiest cheese grits ever.

That being said, our service was so bad on Saturday morning that it bears describing here. First, our harried-looking waiter took more than ten minutes to drop by, take our drink orders and give us menus. Beth was so irritated by that time, she crankily instructed him to go ahead and place an order for beignets and I think he got the notion we were a bit irritated.

Besides a long wait for our food, the next hour passed without event. It doesn’t really bother me to wait a long time for my food- I hate being rushed through a meal. Nothing bothers me more than eating at some chain restaurant where you are served your salad three minutes before your entrée. My meal, a southwestern omelet with cheese grits and toast, was perfect, perfect, perfect. The omelet was full of melted cheese, sausage and zingy pico de gallo. It was so huge that I struggled to eat half of it.

When we finally got our checks, I asked for a box for my formidable leftovers. Harried informed me that to discourage paper waste, Wild Fork now charges for to-go boxes: 35 cents for a large and 15 cents for a small. After I unfroze my gaping jaw, I muttered something about it being preferable to waste food? and said bring on the boxes. Now, heaven help me if I’m ever too broke to spare 35 cents, but the audacity of charging someone for a box when they’ve just spent $15 a piece on breakfast is pretty obnoxious.

It gets better. When I ordered my cappuccino early in the meal, which was listed as $2.95 on the menu, Harried asked me if I’d like a double or a single. Hello! Double. When I looked at my check, I had been charged $6.10 for that cappuccino with an extra shot of espresso. That means my extra shot cost me more than the cappuccino did. What the hell??? When I double checked the price with Harried, he said “Yes, it costs $6.10. You ordered a double.”

Wow. I’m not sure if I can suffer through service like that again… even for cheese grits.