My wife and I eat out most of the time and are wel...

My wife and I eat out most of the time and are well known by most of the higher end restaurants on a first name basis.

We know what type of service and how the food should be based on all the different types of places we go to.

The Mad Hatter is a restaurant that tries to be a higher end restaurant with their food offering, atmosphere, and price. When they say they close at 9:00pm get ready to be kicked out promptly at 9:00pm.

First, the only real positive I can say is that the atmosphere is pretty nice, similar to Acqua in White Bear. But that's about where everything stops.

Our reservations were at 7:45pm and we arrived early at 7:30pm. We had to wait for our table which is expected and spent the time in the neat gift shop with the other couple we were meeting there.

We were seated at our reservation time at 7:45.

Our waitress, Jacqui, provided the single worst experience my wife and I have ever had at a restaurant (especially for a place like this).

To her only credit, she did take orders from the women first. But again, that s where her service ended.

It took 10 minutes for us to get our wine and another 5 to get a glass of water. She came back to take our order then returned shortly after and told our friend that her meal was out. She asked when she wanted instead but we didn't have the menu memorize and then realized that she needed a menu and had to return with one. For a restaurant trying to be higher end, that should have been a given. That wasn't a huge deal but it just kept adding from there.

Our wine showed up a few minutes later and I was surprised that she didn't pour the wine for our friends out of the bottle they ordered. My wife and I ordered a glass.

Our first course showed about in about 10 minutes and my water glass was empty. That was the last I saw of our waitress until our main course showed up 40 minutes after that. Needless to say, that was the last time my water glass was filled, too.

When our meals showed up I asked for a fill of water (she never even looked to see that we were out) and brought out a carafe and said here, you can fill your own water . Well, sorry for being a customer. She didn t even bother filling my glass or anyone else s on the table, I guess it was too much of a bother for her to do. We had no visit to tell us why our meals were taking so long to come out; the waitress was just MIA (as well as the other tables in our area).

So now it was around 8:40 and she (finally) stopped by to ask about dessert. My wife and our friend ordered the bread pudding and that came out about 8:50. We were enjoying a nice conversation when the waitress came back out and took away our glasses and said they were now closed. The time was promptly 9:00pm. I was more than a little taken back by the comment and how she said it. My wife made the same comment in the car later.

The food was ok, my herb steak was actually pretty tasty but it wasn t prepared the best (needs a char on the outside). My wife s shrimp and grits was a smaller portion of food, which we appreciate, and was ok by her account.

I could have cut the waitress some slack if she had more than 5 tables to work on and was truly busy.

As we were being pushed out, the table on the other side also made the comment about being pushed out of the restaurant as well. That was just a bizarre and unexpected experience. I didn t realize that we were on restaurant time; I thought it should be on customer time. Had our food come out on time we probably would have been out by 9:00 but instead we were pushed/rushed out.

I can t think of a single instance of any other dining experience that could come close to the lousy service we had here. Our meal cost $78 which was a on the lower end of the high end restaurants we eat at. Save yourself the time and go to another restaurant; it s not worth your time or money.