Applebee's

Went with my wife for an early valentines day lunch while kids were in school. My wife and I went on our first date to an applebees in East Peoria in 1995.
The hostess sat us down in first booth to the left as you go down stairs from front door. She said to watch out for the bench seat as you "dip down" a bit. She wasn't kidding. There was almost no padding left and i was literally sitting on a support 2x4 in the seat. Why she didn't have us sit at one of the other 6 available booths is a mystery to me.
Food was not very good. Steak was dry, sauteed onions were burnt, french onion soup was more like oil than anything.
Sent a complaint to corporate through the website.

I like Applebee's just not this location. If corporate chooses to read any of these reviews please do yourselves a favor and just close this location. It would be one thing if this was a one time situation but I can't say I remember the last time I had a good experience here.

Our last visit (Sunday Feb. 20, 2011) is a good example of what you can expect.. To begin they had apparently run out of some food items... We didn't find out about this from our waitress but from other customers who apparently were unhappy. The best part was the restaurants bar tender who apparently has seen this happen plenty of times in the past making sarcastic comments about the situation. Fortunately it wasn't directed at customers but if an employee of the restaurant finds the need to complain loudly in front of all of the customers in the bar area it must be bad.

Meanwhile I question if our waitress should work in the restaurant industry. She appeared to be a nice enough person but she didn't know what she was doing. She would largely ignore us for long periods of time. She appeared to be trying to do her job but just wasn't very good at it. When we called her over to point out that all of our drinks needed refills she stated that she had noticed that earlier... We weren't sure why she didn't do anything about it at that point.

The other wait staff seemed to have issues as well... When we were ready to place our orders we hadn't seen our waitress in a while. We asked a waitress near us if she could please send our waitress over. She agreed to do that and promptly went straight to the bartender and started talking about some personal issue she was having, not even making an attempt to find our waitress. Other customers appeared to get the same kind of service as us with one family just leaving after waiting for a while without any contact from wait staff.

I also found it interesting that what I assume was a hostess (there appeared to be two but maybe one of them was a waitress) sat for long periods of time in the lobby area with earbuds in her ears listening to her ipod. Admittedly there were no customers in the waiting area during this time but still....

The food was okay but cold. I assume due to the fact that it probably sat in the window waiting for someone to take it to our table.

I could go on but you get the idea... Again it would be one thing if this was a one or even two time incident but I've yet to have a good experience here in a long time.

Everything I ate or drank tasted like chlorine.  Is that enough of a warning for you?  Other than that it was a standard Applebee's.  But I repeat myself.