Bar Louie

While in town for business, I was intending to have dinner at the sushi spot next door but it was way crowded so I decided to try out Bar Louie since it looked like they had quite a few open tables.

I was seated at one of the highboys by the bar and got a good view of the resto.  The bar was quite busy but then realized, everyone was partaking in liquid therapy and barely anyone was eating, which raised a red flag for me but, I was starving and needed to have dinner.

I wanted try their Tater Tots but figured I can always eat Tots at Sonic.  So I opted for the Fried Calamari - Traditional style (they had a Buffalo version) and had their Baked Mac & Cheese and Fried Chicken.  First off, I have no clue why it took so long for the food to come out, it took about 10-15 before the Calamari came out then another 10-15 after I was done picking at the Calamari for the M&C.  The Fried Calamari was disappointing; definitely not freshly breaded in fact, I'm confident that it was the frozen stuff because while I was picking at it, there was just one huge clump of Calamari I could not for the life of me get to separate.

The Baked Mac & Cheese and Fried Chicken was a big joke. First off, the M&C wasn't baked at all.  How could I tell?  The top of it wasn't crusty or even dry.  Pretty much they just boiled the pasta, added the cheese sauce and threw in chunks of Fried Chicken in it and voila, that's what I got.  I forced myself so hard to eat it but couldn't.  The M&C had zero flavor whatsoever.  It was a horrible dish.

My server was friendly but was hard to locate for refills or to get the bill.

Bottom line, if you're looking to get some liquid therapy, then sure, but in terms of food...seriously skip it.

This is an excellent example when a 2.5 star rating. Bar Louie as might be expected, suffers from a bit of multiple personality disorder. This is not, however a bad thing. To their credit, they keep changing their theme and so the crowd can be quite diverse depending on the night of the week.
The problem lies when the staff starts believing their own crap and think they are cooler than the crowd. Make no mistake, this crowd is not cool, just a bit misguided and full of themselves.
Bad combination, shallow crowd, shallow staff, hard to overcome, perhaps a few well mixed drinks and some finger food? Not quite. Keep moving, nothing to see here.

A couple of months ago some friends suggested this place when we were in the area. The food was OK and so was the ambiance but we had expected it to be way better. The service left a lot to be desired. Our waiter was very nice but we always had a hard time finding him. I can see how it has potential to be a great hangout though. It is very spacious and modern in decor. It has a bar in the middle and they had karaoke the night we went. I think they have live music on other nights. Maybe we just went on the wrong night?

The drinks were strong but they took a long time to get to us. We had a mojito, lemon drop and honey dew martini. We then shared the taters, a flatbread (forgot which one) and the meatballs al forno. The meatballs were good but everything else was really heavy despite sharing it amongst 5 people. I could not take too many bites. The pretzel sticks were probably my favorite with the honey mustard sauce. A little later that night, all of us were different degrees of nauseous. I had it the worst. It took me all of the next day to recover from it.  I just had to recover quickly because we were there to celebrate my girlfriend's big milestone birthday! No time for being sick.  Bed rest, ginger ale, soda crackers and all that jazz. Some of the other girls had skipped the meatballs and the others had skipped the flatbread. Not everyone drank. The only thing we ALL tasted were the taters. It must have been that. Not sure what happened there.  

Needless to say, I will skip this place the next time I am in Orlando. I wanted to give it a chance but it's a definite no-go for me.