After a friend of ours told us to give this place a try, being fresh seafood enthusiasts and after hearing all of the hype, we finally decided to go in and see what it was all about. In all of my life of trying new restaurants, this experience by FAR takes the cake and was unforgettable in the most horrific & disgusting way. I would have much rather taken the over $100 PLUS TIP amount that was wasted at this establishment, and thrown it out the window or better yet in the garbage.\r
We saw that you could conveniently make a "reservation online". What it does NOT tell you online is that this function is no longer in service. So like idiots, we made the reservation online. We arrive at the restaurant and are greeted by what looked like to me very young "hostesses" that were absolutely clueless when we told them we had a 7pm reservation. Not to mention extremely unprofessional and unfriendly. They went to get another younger girl with an attitude that rudely informed us in a scolding manner that "for future reference we will honor your reservation tonight but the online reservation function does not work anymore", all of this said with a rude demeaning attitude towards my parents, in which we told her to DISABLE the function online, or at least put a note that it doesn't work. How professional of this restaurant right?\r
We ordered the fried calamari and oysters rockefeller for appetizers, in which we received something more like tomatoes rockefeller and fried crumbs. In the calamari appetizer, there were roughly around only 10 chunks of actual calamari, and the rest were burnt overcooked CRUMBS. The tomatoes were the only aspect present in the oysters rockefeller, nothing but tomatoes and cheese with a tiny oyster inside, which was served lukewarm. Over 10$+ for these "appetizers"?!\r
It gets better. Its like this place knows the seafood isn't fresh and is horrible, so they try to "cover up" for this by giving you extra "WOW" additions, like huge over-sized buns/breads, and extra batter in hopes that you won't notice. But being fresh seafood experts and native floridians, we KNOW fresh & we ABSOLUTELY noticed.\r
Their buffalo shrimp wrap arrived to the table as thin as almost a flautas, with hardly any shrimp inside or fillings. My fried shrimp arrived completely saturated in the most mushy, disgusting beer batter. I had to peel all of it off to get inside to the shrimp that was TINY. Its like they over-coat all of the seafood in extra batter to fool you. The shrimp had a chemically preserved taste to them as well. It was a disaster.\r
My parents "fried fish" sandwiches were served on a ridiculously gigantic baguette, and their fish fillets were again, over-coated in their disgusting beer batter and I was informed by them that the fish was extremely old and fishy tasting, and had all gray/black gooey spots inside of the fillet. \r
All of this food was over 100$, and we gracefully didn't complain about any of this to management. If you go out of your way to try this restaurant after the kind of experience we had as first time customers you are a complete fool. We are all thankful that we didn't have food poisoning from this place the next day. If we were offered a free meal to come back and try this place again we would absolutely decline. We are passing on the word about this place to everyone we know. I'm not a fan of the Whale's Rib either, but this place makes the Whale's Rib look and taste like 5 star cuisine. You have been warned, stay AWAY!!
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