Carrabba's Italian Grill

This place is pretty good. I'm not crazy about it being open right up to the mall as it catches a lot of that riff raff. All in all not terrible for a chain Italian place.

Meh, standard mass produced Italian fare mixed with a bunch of non-foodie people.

Um...not such a great restaurant. We hadn't been there in 5 years (had a meal there the week we moved into the city). We used their "call ahead" service and arrived there to be told it would be a 10 minute wait. The people in front of us were told 25-30 minutes, so we thought it was a good idea. 30 minutes later, everyone was seated in front of us and we were finally seated (not happy). Had to ask for silverware and salt after the appetizer came.

HATED the kitchen staff. We were seated at a table in the bar area with lots of people and noise, and we could still hear this chef **screaming** repeatedly with every order that was being plated. Literally, like she was standing next to us and she was ALL the way across the restaurant. It was bad enough that we told the manager when he stopped by. He basically said, "I'm well aware and I apologize." Poor guy. The rest of the staff didn't seem happy (lots of grumbling amongst themselves that we heard because we were near the aisle).

The house salad was yucky (plain romaine, literally 2 kalamata olives and 2 pieces of sliced celery that were black for some reason). The salad dressing was super-thick and not that great. My chicken was okay (two very thin fillets on a plate with two large scoops of mashed potato) but toward the end I realized the piece I was chewing on was RAW under the breading. I carefully cut around that area (about a 2 x 2" piece) and showed the server when he was picking up the plates. He basically said "oops."

The hostesses were horrible about turning over tables. There was a guy waiting who we heard on his cell phone complaining to someone that there were 5 tables in the back unseated and he'd been waiting for 40 minutes. There was a table behind us that took 25 minutes to turn over (literally, just to bus and reseat). They're not doing something correctly.

Hopefully I won't get food poisoning from the piece(s) I ate. It'll be another 5 years before we try again. Our gift cards would be better spent at Outback or someplace else.