“Dear PoPville,
Had a Gilt City voucher for brunch at the Brighton (more on that later), so we ordered a carafe of mimosas and two entrees. The English breakfast was okay, a bit flavorless, and only had two pieces of mushrooms (not even a whole mushroom) even though it is one of the several main components of the dish. The salmon bagel seemed okay as well, but nothing on the menu jumped out at us, so we played it safe. The 1-liter carafe of mimosas seemed to be 90% orange juice and hardly any bubbly at all. For $27, that’s ripoff territory.
Our server, Lyndsay, was wonderful and warm and treated us well. The management needs a bit of work though. Our Gilt City voucher had expired two days earlier, but, as various laws and rules dictate and as written in the fine print (confirmed to me by Gilt themselves), the Vendor (i.e. the restaurant) is obligated to honor the face value of the voucher ($40 in this case) as part of the payment for the bill. First level manager brought it to the second level manager, and finally to a third manager who tried to tell us that we were wrong, Gilt is wrong, and they would not have anything to do with the voucher. Basically told us to pay the full bill and try to get our money back from Gilt themselves.
Besides being wrong and in violation of Gilt’s terms, the final manager was abrupt and unhelpful, bordering on rude. Lucky for us, Gilt did apologize to us for the incident and gave us a refund for the voucher. Plus, we never need to set foot in the Brighton ever again — Mediocre food I can forgive, but price gouging and bad management I cannot.
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Leaving the restaurant stone-sober (but with lots of Vitamin C!), we headed over to the Kirwan for a pint and to check it out for future reference. (more…)
