Archive for June, 2010

In Hampton Virginia there is a Sonics restaurant at the corner of Mercury Blvd and Power Plant drive. Travellers and locals alike should avoid this awful place.

When you drive up to one of the parking spaces with a menu board you are greeted by the loudest loudspeaker ever created by mankind to take your order. It had to measure 170 decibels. Not as loud as a jet engine but louder than a Who concert.

We were trying to tell the booming voice what we wanted to eat while simultaneously recoiling at the force of the sound coming from the speaker when the misunderstood order was read back to us.

There was a handy credit card payment system attached to the menu board that didn’t work. You could swipe your card but the digital readout was broken so you couldn’t follow the directions on how to pay credit versus debit.

The food took forever. Finally a manager shouted out a window at a clump of three waiters/waitresses sitting at a picnic table to come back and pickup food for delivery to one of the many waiting vehicles. Why the manager chose to shout out of a window instead of using one of the absurdly loud speakers instead made no sense. Anyways one waiter was smoking so he crushed his cigarette and put the half-smoked butt in his service smock- the same place he carries drinking straws, salt, ketchup packs, and spare change.

This waiter picked up our food without washing his hands and then walked our meal tray to five different cars asking them if our food belonged to them. When the guy finally got to our car smelling like an ashtray he had the nerve to ask for a tip. His request was denied.

The food was tepid and mushy.