Aurora--Brooklyn

718.388.5100

I’ll admit that we were loud and rowdy. I mean, for Christ’s sake we had kazoos. At $100 a person though, that’s no excuse. I’ve said before and now I’ll say it again: nothing can fuck up a perfectly good time like bad service.

We were ten strong and it was our friend’s birthday. We’d all eaten there before and appreciated the authentic Italian fare. And truth be told, when you finally get the food it’s pretty fucking good. It’s real Italian in the sense that it’s not dumbed down cream sauces and breaded veal that American’s have grown to associate with the boot. But this is all besides the point, because I’ve seen four-year-olds that could serve a table better than the way we were served on this particular night.

So…where do I begin? How about it took twenty minutes for us to get a drink order. To make things simple we asked for a bottle of red and a bottle of white. A few of us threw a curve ball at our waiter by asking for some Peroni’s. Evidently the chore of taking such a complex drink order short-circuited our waiter. He delivered the white wine, opened it, offered it, then left the red wine on the table unopened. I can only guess that he thought one of us would have a wine key. When he resurfaced, five minutes later, with the Peroni’s I asked to get the red wine open. His curt response was that he couldn’t serve us the beers and wine at the same time, he only has, like, two hands—I want to throw out that I have nothing against gay people, male or female, and generally consider someone’s sexual preference a non issue in all manners of interaction, unless of course, I get, like, an affected gay bitch boy who, like, has to talk, like all of the gay designers on Project Runway, like, so gross— Yes, fuckhead you only have two hands and evidently half a brain, so why don’t you open the red wine while the micros printout of the beer order is probably fourth or fifth in line, instead of leaving an un-opened bottle on the table to go wait, yes wait, for the beer?

Two-handed Jack wasn’t finished with us though. After the twenty-minute delay in getting our drink order, it was another cool twenty to order our food. When we all finally received our first course, it was about an hour after we sat down. When we were served our entrée it was a mere hour and forty-five minutes after we sat down. I can’t necessarily blame our handicapped server on this one, although he couldn’t be bothered to help run our food, leaving it to the runner to take five trips from the kitchen, because of the fascinating conversation he must have been having about gloves, or mittens, or other apparatus that involve not one but two hands. Nonetheless, the dinner took up our night; dessert was also fucked up, because we unintentionally confused our server by asking for Sambuca with our espresso, and almost expected the mistake.

Here’s the fucking the rub though, and might explain my overtly rant filled tone. We were still hit with a 20% gratuity because of the size of our party! Utterly fucking ridiculous! True, a large party should mean a more difficult job for the server. And a loud, kazooing, party that desperately wants to get drunk despite ever attempt by captain inept to keep us sober, is probably more difficult than say, a party of ten republicans. But the service on this night was not worth 20%, and since our check was around $1000, this fuck did not deserve $200 for what I could describe as the worst service I’ve ever had in New York City. Aurora, like so many other promising restaurants in the Burg, is off my list due to some stupid, pretentious, shit head who doesn’t consider the $300 a night he/she makes a “good job.” You’re servers! It’s your job to be servile. I’m not asking for you to abandon self-respect, but there is a degree of caste in your position. You make your money on serving people. Satisfying their requests. Making them happy. What’s wrong with that?