Level Dining Lounge

The food is great, the staff is friendly, the prices are reasonable, the atmosphere is sophisticated and fun, and the dinks are cold and full. What more can I say?

Forgetable

 Went to level and it was forgetable.  Maybe because they were gearing up for what looked like karaoke night, but the food was not memorable nor was the service.  The atmosphere was odd, very "short north" yet it seemed like everyone else was just looking around waiting on karaoke.

I stopped in here the other night for the first time with two of my girlfriends.  We all work in the bar industry and definitely know the difference between bartenders who are having a bad night, and bartenders who simply give terrible service, and unfortunately I am going to have to say this was bad, bad service.

We go out for girls night every Thursday, and we like to get an early start (around 8 or 9pm) so we can avoid running into crowds later in the night. We decided to try something different and check out Level, since we had heard good things before. When we came in, the chairs at the bar were all taken, but there was plenty of standing room around the bar, and most of the tables in the dining room were empty, so we knew we came at a slow moment and theoretically should get good service, right? Wrong. We walked up to the bar in a spot where there was a gap big enough to stand in, and made eye contact with one of the 3 bartenders behind the bar.  Well, instead of coming over and serving us, he looked at us and then walked in the opposite direction.  The other two bartenders- and then the bar-back as well -did the exact same thing! We stood there for another 10-15 minutes and watched the bartenders continue to blatantly ignore us while they stood around talking to each other and periodically glared in our direction, as if they were trying to make us as uncomfortable as possible and leave.

After a solid 10-15 minutes of standing patiently waiting for someone to come serve us, we decided to put our cards back in our wallets and leave.  Just as we were doing this, one of the bartenders finally came over and greeted us with the super-friendly (not!) line: "What do you girls want?". I quickly ordered us 3 shots so we could take them and leave. I decided to be nice with my tip still, and gave them a 100% ($12 on $12) tip, just incase their terrible attitudes were due to bad tippers earlier in the night.  Right as I finished signing the receipt, the bartender came over, made a point of looking at the tip right in front of me, and then walked away without so much as a smile or a thank you or any sort of acknowledgement.  We took our shots and got out of there as quickly as possible.

I am seriously still shocked by how rude the bartenders were to us, especially since it was our first visit there. Needless to say, I have never felt more unwelcome in a bar before, and I will definitely NOT be returning.