one of the first restaurants we went to after moving our family to the pensacola area was located where this restaurant now stands. the place was busy, thefoodand service were good, and we all enjoyed our meals. six years later, my husband and i decided to try the place again. (we live over forty miles away, so it was a trek just to get there.)
we arrived for a late lunch at 2:30 and there were less than ten customers in the place. the service started out good until we began experiencing problems with the food. we ordered the loaded fries and they came out very quickly, too quickly. the fries were placed cold onto the platter, cheese and bacon added on top, and then placed in the salamander until the cheese was crispy. they were brought to our table and were barely lukewarm. it took five minutes to find someone to take them back to the kitchen. what came out fifteen minutes later was a little bit better, but the fries were greasy, the result of frying them in oil that is too cold.
when our entrees arrived a few minutes later, the problems really began. my husband ordered the parmesan grouper and what he received was certainly not grouper with the sides that he had ordered. the parmesan cheese on the "grouper" was under a rather unappealing tomato sauce and it was burnt around the edges. my husband being one to not rock the boat, decided to eat his meal. he ordered for his sides the gouda cheese grits and the herbed potatoes. what he received was coleslaw and green beans! (the coleslaw was mine and his potatoes were on my plate, so we simply made the switch, though the waitress wanted to take back both plates to the kitchen.) when the waitress brought the "gouda" cheese grits a few minutes later, they were orange. (gouda cheese is not orange, but a pale creamy color.) the gouda cheese grits tasted more like american cheese grits. the herbed potatoes were microwaved because parts of the potatoes were still cold.
i ordered the grilled grouper with a citrus beurre blanc sauce with coleslaw and green beans for my sides. with the green beans i received a large quantity of sliced and steamed onions with copious amounts of black pepper. some of the beans were still green while others had turned brown. they had obviously been microwaved since some of them were hot and others were cold. they were edible, but not very appetizing. the coleslaw would have been better had it not been swimming in the sauce. when i tasted the beurre blanc sauce it tasted nothing like butter or citrus. it did taste like it was rancid with a very strong flavor and smell. i have made and tasted numerous beurre blancs and that tasted nothing like it! the grilled "grouper" was cooked on a grill that had not been cleaned and had bits of blackenedfoodthat had been cooked on the grill previously. totally unappetizing! when i asked the waitress to take the fish away after explaining the problem, she asked rather rudely if i wanted something else. i asked to see the menu again (this was our first--and last--time there, so i did not know the menu), and when she returned with the menu she tossed it on the table and walked away. she returned a full ten minutes later and i placed my order for calamari off of the appetizer menu.
about fifteen minutes later and long after my husband had finished eating, my calamari arrived swimming in a pool of grease in its tiny little dish. the sauce served on the side was a wholly unappetizing concoction of some kind of marinara sauce and maybe a thai chili sauce. it tasted sweet, hot, and tomatoey and had a big blob of unmelted parmesan cheese plunked on top. the calamari had been cooked in oil that was not up to the proper frying temperature, so it had been in the oil long enough to slightly brown the breading which caused the squid to be overcooked. after chewing down the rubber bands that they called calamari, we asked our waitress for the check. five minutes later she returned with the check and disappeared once again. i went to the restroom and the waitress had still not returned to the table to collect my husband's credit card. almost five minutes after my return, she picked up the check. so from the time we asked for the check until the time we got our credit card back was over twenty minutes!
needless to say, we will never return to nick's boathouse again.