Rosie O’Grady’s (New York City) — Restaurant Review

Rosie O’Grady’s rosieogradys.com 800 7th Avenue (7th Ave & 52nd St) New York, NY 10019 (map)

Survey Says: High price for ‘eh’ quality

My parents, my grandmother, and I were in New York City for just enough time to visit a friend, have lunch and go back home to southern New Jersey (suburb of Philadelphia, where my folks live). As the foreigners/immigrants we are, it would have been a complete waste to have been in New York City without seeing Times Square. It would have been like… heck, there is no good analogy for this: it would have been like being in New York City and NOT seeing Times Square!

So, after much Google searching for restaurants near the iconic tourist location, we settled on a restaurant called Rosie O’Grady’s in the corner of 7th Avenue and 52nd Street.

Rosie’s is an irish pub that is up a level from a Molly Malone’s. This is the Target to Molly Malone’s Wal-mart. It has a full menu (including filet mignon), and a pub atmosphere. We had high hopes.

I ordered the filet mignon (I must confess my Google search centered around “steak”), while my parents ordered fish. Here’s the low down of our experience:

1. The bread was cold and stale (or at the very least you could tell it had been sitting out all day), and the butter was also cold.
2. The shrimp cocktail appetizer tasted exactly like the precooked frozen shrimp I buy at the store and then warm up at home. You can tell shrimp came from frozen because they are chewy, like octopus.
3. The filet mignon was undercooked despite my having ordered it medium, but I decided to overlook this considering I was having my steak.
4. The presentation left much to be desired. My meal was $30 for the steak alone, and I was expecting a presentation deserving of the extra cash.
5. The first limonade the waiter brought for me had a fruit fly floating in it (I would have said swimming, but I’m pretty sure the darn thing was dead)
6. Due to this incident, the waiter (Marco, from Ecuador, very nice) decided to spot us dessert. We got a free apple pie (which looked like it had been made last week) with ice cream. It did not hit the spot, I must say.

In the end, I don’t think I would go back. Normally I would just say this on principle alone, it is New York City after all and it deserves to be explored. But this time I must say my reasons are reduced to a simple word: “quality.”

Also, let me leave you with a bit of an anecdote. On our way out, I noticed that the hostess was having her lunch (or early dinner?) right by the main entrance. I figured if she wanted privacy she would have eaten all the way in the back (wrong assumption), and I decided to be rude and interrupt her meal (please note that I do know -NOW- that this is the WRONG thing to do to someone who probably has the crappiest job in the world). You see, the curiosity hit me when I saw her eating food from the restaurant, and I wanted to ask her what her favorite dish was. So I did (again, I’m SORRY).

She immediately got up, without looking at me, grabbed a menu, and pointed at the Lobster Ravioli. I smiled a lot and thanked her (and apologized) profusely, but she looked like she was trying to mask a level of annoyance never seen before. She never spoke a word. I immediately felt bad and had a thought: she probably gets bothered by foreigners/tourists ALL THE TIME. What can I say, the language barrier alone makes it difficult to communicate, let alone cultural differences. This woman was ON HER BREAK, and this stupidly culturally-inept person (with an accent, mind you) was interruption her break to ask her a completly inane question that did not matter at all because that person (me) had already decided never to come back to this restaurant again.

And so ends my restaurant tales of New York City.

ina