86 West, Doylestown’s Note To Locals, Run!
It’s always interesting to watch a new restaurant follow the predictable patterns from being the new and innovative hot spot to its demise as an unfriendly cesspool with a filthy kitchen and inferior management. You’ve seen it in your own town; a building is under rehab construction for several months, the interior and exterior get a face lift and the passersby look on with anticipation of the gastronomical ingestions that will be served. Will it be seafood? Will it be a fine dining establishment? Will it bring in the rowdy crowd from out of town? Will it cater to the young and hip or the comfortably aged and refined?
Once the face lift is complete and the sign goes up, it’s just a matter of time until the curious and eager come in droves. At first, it’s packed and seating is limited due to the demand. The service is friendly so that there is a pleasant impression to bring in repeat business. The greater smiles, the kitchen hustles, the bar tender adds a favorable extra dash of alcohol in his concoctions and of course the waiter is full of complements on your cuisine choice and waits on you with an overwhelming attention to detail leading you to leave a fat tip and the post hypnotic cue that triggers happy thoughts of sustenance paradise every time you pass this new spot of the month.
But it’s only a matter of time until the zebra stripes wash off the miserable, decrepit horse and all is exposed; 86 West in Doylestown, Pennsylvania is one of those places. I took my family there the week it opened and the service was great, the food was succulent and delicious and the glasses and utensils were spotless. The experience was wonderful. We went back only a few months later and, dear God, it was as if we had wondered into a twilight zone episode where we existed on the ‘opposites’ alternate universe.
The food was dry, the plates, glasses and utensils were crusty and the service…well let’s just say that I’ve never been in a restaurant where the little cook comes out of the kitchen to pick a fight with a 50 year old women who sent her raw steak back for microwaving. To say that 86 West in Doylestown has fallen out of grace with the locals of this little town is an understatement. I’ve had better service from a 14 year old kid at a McDonald’s drive thru window in north Philly than I’ve had at 86 West.
I’m fortunate to be able to eat for a living as I provide content for close to 6,000 food blogs in the United States, Canada and throughout Europe and I have to tell you, after eating in, quite literally, 1,000′s of places, I have never seen such a despicable, blatantly rude, egotistical down spiral in my career. Let me explain my point. We went into the restaurant and from the time we stepped in there was this aura of depression. The air was heavy, the servers looked like the boogeyman smacked them around with a moldy loaf of bread and the manager (I never did catch her name looked as though she had been sucking down quarts of prune juice from the exhaust pipe of a 1975 Chevy lemon (yes, use your imagination on this), I knew right then that I was going to have a lot to write about this experience.
We are seated to a table smeared with butter and salt and of course the obligatory table crust from two weeks ago (I believe they had apple eating contest with a chili cook-off, or maybe it was bobbing for apples in boiling hot chili? I can’t recall.) we asked the manager who seated us for a cloth to wipe the table down and she looked down her nose as if I asked her to run face first into a buzz saw. This, obviously being beneath her asked the waiter to bring us a rag and the waiter, a punk kid no older than 17 tossed the filthy towel on our table and said, “Be with you in a minute”. We looked at the rag, looking as if it spend the past three years being tortured in a Vietnamese prison camp, looked at each other and then just laughed as this was beyond bad service, we had stumbled into some kind of Holland S&M, fetish emporium that just happened to serve food. We just sat there in silence and shock. Finally, the kid blessed us with his presents and took our order. Sixty two minutes later our food arrived, my wife received her salad, my son got his chicken fingers (of course his plate was scolding hot and his food was ice cold) and I got my steak, medium-well.
After over an hour of assimilating into this obscene and completely miserable (yet simultaneously hilarious) environment, when our food was served all we could do is laugh when my wife found a thick, long strand of hair with white flakes crustily coating the strand in her food, my son bit into a frozen chicken tender and slippery, slimy fries and yes, my steak was burnt on the outside and absolutely, completely raw on the inside.
When we saw the manager we explained the situation and even someone as rude and lacking in the personality department as she was, agreed that it was pretty disgusting and she agreed to take my steak back to get cooked a little more (oh, I forgot to say that she picked up my son’s chicken tender with her filthy hands and said to my 8 year old child, “What are you talking about”, pinching the meet between her fingers, “it’s perfectly hot”, then over to my wife and said, “Show me the hair”, my timid wife pointed to this crusty black shaft sitting on top of her salad and with a bulging eye she said, “How do I know that’s not your hair?”. Well, my blue eyed, ‘blond’ haired wife just looked at this manager and even I was speechless. When she got to me, she picked up my plate, held it up to the light and said, “Oh, I can see this is not cooked, I’ll take it back.”). My son just sat there looking at my wife whose jaw was dropped and eyes bugged out staring at me but I was quickly distracted by this Amer-Asian guy who was obviously the cook who was standing at the table of senior citizens next to us yelling at a lady who asked for a clean coffee mug because the one she got at the end of the meal with her tea had lipstick on it, how dare she!
Before I got my steak the waiter brought me the check and stood there waiting for payment as if I was going to try to leave without paying so I gave him my card, he ran it and we just left. Yes, 86 West in Doylestown, PA is, by far, the gastronomical cesspool of Bucks County and a perfect example of a dining facility that was hot for a minute but fizzled out quick. The treatment of customers has become the stuff of legends and the little guy that comes out from the kitchen to pick fights with teenagers and senior citizens is still the self-proclaimed mayor of Doylestown cuisine.
Here are the facts: customers are key, they are kingdom royalty and enter an establishment to be served. It’s that simple. When the idea that the customer is central to a thriving and sound dining facility, the slippery road to demise quickly stumbles into the equation and the end is near. 86 West in Doylestown, Pennsylvania receives zero out of four stars and has entered into the dining hall of shame.
Want to find out more about Doylestown Food Stops, Aliens have taken over 86 West in Doylestown, yes seriously.
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