Applebee's Neighborhood Grill & Bar

Great lunch combos.
Berry spinach salad SOLID.
Decent service.

How can I describe awful?  How about an entire meal that comes to you undercooked not once, but TWICE?   Really?  When I ask for a steak done "medium, Hot and Pink" and it comes out bleeding and red, that's nowhere near medium.  The baked potato was hard as a rock, and the vegetables?  Try warm salad on my plate, because everything was totally raw.  I've blanched vegetables for freezing more than these were cooked.  Even the Zucchini slices were hard and raw, and every cook knows those are the easiest veggies to overcook, but you can't cook them mixed with carrots and broccoli without expecting the squash to disintegrate or the veggies to be raw.  C'mon, guys, that's home ec 101.  You steam the tough veggies until just starting to be tender, then you add the tender veggies to finish the dish with the seasonings.  And a baked potato has to be cooked until you can squeeze it.  And the steak?  if you don't use a meat thermometer that is accurate, then you can slit the middle half way to look at the readiness, then turn it over to serve it if done, or turn it over to cook it a little more if not done enough, to keep the heat in the meat.  You have to know the hot and cool spots on the grill and cook the more rare steaks over the hot spots shorter, and the mediums and well dones on the cooler spots longer.  

My meal was so poorly prepared, I had to take the meal home to cook it myself to get the steak to the proper done-ness.  The potato and veggies were still raw after giving it a quick blast in my inverter.  I had to nuke the potato for an additional 5 minutes to get it done to barely edible, and the veggies I ended up throwing away as they had already gotten dry and I got tired of trying to fix their screwup.  

This is a very simple dish to prepare, but the cooks aren't capable of of preparing the most basic food well.   Being open late is the ONLY thing this place has going for it.  The food here isn't worth dirtying a dish....    The food is overpriced and poorly prepared.  Probably the last time I ever eat at this chain.

The food was better than I expected (blackened tilapia), but I wouldn't necessarily come back here.

We came here for dinner a couple weeks ago, and got a table right away. Our server was very friendly, but his table side approach was lacking. He walked right up to the table and said "what can I get you to drink?" No hello, no nothin'.

The women's bathroom floor is very sticky, bathroom smells strongly of sewer gas - so much so it was difficult to breathe.

Server next to us was very thorough in cleaning and moved tables to get under them.

The weird thing was we didn't get our check or a goodbye from our server. We got our check from someone else with no explanation. It was a really bizarre ending to the meal.