I’d been wanting to go to Anytime, a Korean fusion tapas restaurant located in New York City’s Koreatown for a couple months.

Then last week, I was really excited to finally have the opportunity to trek over to Anytime. The experience both met my expectations and didn’t meet my expectations in the same visit. I can’t recall a time when a restaurant flipped my opinion from one extreme to the other (in a good way), so I’ll be telling this story / review of Anytime in two parts.

Chapter One: The First 30 Minutes

We booked a reservation and was immediately seated around 8 PM. The place was jumping with servers crisscrossing the restaurant taking orders, serving food, filling waters and putting in work, etc.

We immediately ordered drinks with Server #1 and after they arrived, we weren’t ready to order and needed a couple minutes to figure out the menu. After a few minutes, we put our menus aside, enjoyed our sake and cocktails and were chilling; waiting to order. We chatted, drank and waited for our server to come back to the table, but they didn’t return. No matter it was busy so we understood (we were both previously servers). We waited some more and still no one came to take our order. Again, no matter, we thought we would just wave one of the server down to order. We did so once with server #1, she acknowledged that she saw my hand, so I thought we were good to go. We waited and watched her pass by our table a few times without stopping. That’s a little annoying, but again it was busy. So we waited some more.

I then waved down another server, Server #2, she stopped and acknowledged us again and without saying anything gave us an indication that she’d be right back. Server #2 went into the kitchen and didn’t return. At this point, I’ll admit I was getting a little bothered and thought this was odd behavior, but again it was busy and the servers could have forgotten even though Server #1 passed by us a couple more times in that time.

So when Server #1 walked by again, I raised my hand to catch her attention. She saw me again and non-verbally acknowledged our presence (I forgot how, but I think it might have been just eye contact and a nod).

What happened next turned a seemingly innocuous situation to full-blown disrespect.

Then we watched as Server #1 pass by our table (which was situated very much in the middle of the narrow part of the dining room) without stopping. Not only that, when she did come over, she cleaned the table right next to us; taking plates to the kitchen. Then she came back and wiped down the table without looking over once. Not just that, she returned again without a word to us to place settings on the table. Now these actions  infuriated me — this was no doubt in my mind, 100% her being stubborn, petty and letting us know who was in charge. Despite my feelings, I still held out small glint of hope that she would return.

No such hope. I watched her pass by another two times before I told my partner that if she passes by our table another three times without taking our order I would go to the host and manager whom were directly across from our table juggling checks and greeting new and exiting customers.

If you wanted to place bets on whether Server #1 came back to the table or not, now is the time put your wager down perhaps with this SugarHouse Sportsbook Promo Code. No surprise that the pattern continued. She passed our table again and again and again (and maybe again). So I got up from the table and spoke to the host about what’s been happening with Server #1 and gave them a ten second TL;DR version of events.

Chapter Two: The Last 45 Minutes