I'd still eat it!

Yes, but would you PAY for it.

Applebees is simply unacceptable, even when it looks like it should. In my opinion, they are the worse of the chain restaurants, serving up food that is only marginally better than a microwave dinner. I'm sure much of it is prepared by Sysco and sent to the local store to be thrown into an oven or dipped into the fryer and then thrown onto a plate.

Gross food.

What happened to just sending it back instead of complaining on a website?

"what happened to all the hot fudge that was supposed to grace this excuse for an Applebees sundae..."

Duh! Isn't it obvious? Its all over the outside of the 'bowl!'

but look at whats overflowing on top.

@zentec: Word. Awful, awful garbage. If I ever get dragged there by someone else, I've found that ordering the least healthy menu items are always the best choice. Anything attempting non-bar food is a mistake.

Applebees really is the WORST. My partner got an Applebees gift certificate from parents of a student of his - which was incredibly nice of them,- and yet, we discovered, even when it's free, Applebees isn't worth it. Greasy, tasteless and unappetitizing to look at.

I'm also not a fan of Applebee's... I've never found a single thing I'd actually like to eat on their menu. I'm not even the picky type.

Its Applebee's... What more can you expect? If I'm eating at one of these chain restaurants, better believe it's gonna be ATLEAST Fridays.

Friday's is the worst. Greasy crap food.

Applebees used to be good then the food got worse and worse.

As far as a chain restaurants go I like Famous Dave's.

Crapplebees is how we've referred to it for a looong time.

Haven't been back in about 5 years, but I see their commitment to dining excellence is still going strong.

@pinkbunnyslippers: "What happened to just sending it back instead of complaining on a website?"

I wouldn't "send back" anything at Applebees! It'd be guaranteed to come back with 100% more spit. It's two fuckin dollars. You just take the hit and tell your friends not to waste their money. And thanks to all this wonderful technology, the friends you warn goes from 5-10 to 50,000.

Complaining on websites FTW! haha

@Skankingmike: Yeah, I think things really picked up speed on their way down the shitter when IHOP took over.

I don't hate some of their Weight Watchers dishes, but I've found I can duplicate them and do a better job at home. They used to have this tilapia filet with mango salsa that I really liked. The recipe for it is all over the web so I no longer need to darken their (screaming kid-filled, flair-filled, kitschy) door. I've pretty much given up ordering dessert at a restaurant unless it's at a place like Culver's (it's hard to mess up a sundae) or a couple of local joints that actually employ pastry chefs. The rest is just pre-fabbed freezer cake crap.

If you have a Ruby Tuesday in your neighborhood I would say go there. Applebee's really is horrible and is only getting worse. I stopped eating there about 4 years ago.

I haven't been to an Applebee's in 4 years. I have gone to several locations (n different states) and had bad service, undercooked food, and in general horrible experiences. It is the worst.

Did you bother to point this out to the server? If you had, and their customer service was decent, they would have apologized and promptly brought you a new one and maybe even have removed the charge from your bill.

Is this really a reason to submit this to Consumerist? One incorrectly prepared representative sample?

Petty much?

@KyleOrton: I agree one hundred percent. I have gone Applebee's several times. Any time I have actually gone for a sit-down lunch or dinner-- the meal has been flavorless. Now, if it is a get together at the bar-- that's a different story. Pub-grub and drinks/beers are okay.

But then again, my judgement probably impaired by the Pearl Harbors I have been imbibing!

Over here in NE, I rather go to a 99 or Chili's, if I want that type of ambience.

I haven't had a good experience at Applebees in a long time either. The ONLY good one I have ever been to is in Starkville, MS. The food was good (and NOT undercooked) and the service was great. Everywhere else, the service is just unbearable. Recently a large group I was with went to one and we had to flag down different servers to get refills on drinks and order food. We were there for 2 1/2 hours, not that we wanted to be. Everything took SOOOO long. We were there at 3:00 in the afternoon, so it's not like it was busy.

God, what the hell is wrong with people? That sundae looks DELICIOUS! There are people in Haiti who are EATING DIRT COOKIES (seriously, Google it) and you're bitching b/c your foody-woody doesn't match the picture-wicture??! Get a real problem to worry about and grow up.

Last time my family ate at Applebee's, my wife's steak was an unchewable hunk of cartilage and fat. My steak (we ordered the same thing) was an OK steak. The son had chicken tenders (he's had better he said). We brought it to the attention of the waitress, who brought it up to the manager, who said he would have a new one cooked right away. After two more visits from the manager apologizing for the delay, we finally left the restaurant, with the wife's meal packed as take out.

Now I understand that sometimes a bad piece of meat gets out to a customer. But to wait 30+ minutes on a redo was a bit extreme. They were crowded (but I don't remember waiting for a table, and I don't remember seeing anybody waiting when we left), but a redo should automatically go to the head of the line, not just get put in the queue, and it was still ridiculous at that. I would hate to think what it would have been like if she had ordered it well done, and not medium rare!

(n.b., I used to eat regularly with a friend in which we would order the same thing, the only difference is that he would order his steak well done, and I'd have mine rare... I'm sure the cooks weren't happy with that.)

Now, compare this to Lonestar Steakhouse where my wife who showed the waitress that her steak was medium well instead of medium rare (she was going to eat it anyways, she just wanted to show that the cooks weren't cooking right). The manager came over, whisked her plate away and less than one minute later had a new steak in front of her, medium rare.

I used to eat regularly at Applebee's, but it's been years.

@Daniel Alderman:

You need to watch the movie "Waiting" and then decide whether or not you want to retract the first paragraph of that comment.

I never send food back at a restaurant, mostly out of paranoia of what the waiter/chef will do to my "new" dish(spit anyone? or other bodily fluids I'd rather not think about). I will however complain to a manager if I get really bad food and when they offer me a new dish I decline usually I'll either have my item taken off the bill or they will comp the whole meal but that's just my experience.

@jwarner132:Of course, Waiting... is a comedy film, which are often known to blow mundane situations out of proportion for laughs.

@pinkbunnyslippers: One gets attention and drives traffic to a blog.

One doesn't.

@mgy: Oh right, the idea of an underpaid annoyed worker spitting (or worse) in a $2 ice cream is SOOOO blown out of proportion. That would never happen in real life!

@pixiegirl1: Totally.

@mgy: Have you not worked in the restaurant business?

@monkey1976: Yes, agreed. We should all shut up and accept poor service and product because people in Haiti are eating dirt. Thanks for straitening that out for us. Next, maybe you can help us solve the problem in Burma - maybe accept food with lead poisoning?

I stopped eating at Ruby Tuesday's for the exact same reason. I ordered a basket of chicken wings based off of how delicious they looked on the menu. They arrived swimming in a sea of grease with more of a butter sauce coating than BBQ. They looked nothing like the juicy wings pictured. Just nasty. I called the waiter over and showed him the picture on the menu and compared it to what was in front of me. Pointing at the menu, I said, "I want my wings to look like these." He took them back to the kitchen. A few minutes later he brought them out and they looked just as unappealing as they did before.

After another instance like this at a different Ruby Tuesday's that was it for me. I swore to never eat there again. Years later, I still haven't.

Regarding Applebees, I don't know about their sundae's but I ordered the BBQ ribs at the Applebees in Times Square. They were some of the best restaurant ribs I have ever tasted. Good god, those ribs were good! There are popular steak and BBQ restaurants around here in D.C. that pale in comparison to what I had at Applebees. I hope those NY ribs weren't a fluke because there's an Applebees near me where I hope to duplicate the experience.

When I worked retail, my co-worker and I used to eat at the one by us upwards of 3-4 times a week. The food was decent and the service was great (since we knew everyone).

I moved on after graduating college and a few months ago stopped in and you can tell that chain is going downhill. My steak tasted like it was cooked in a nuwave oven and the service was just okay, even though the restaurant was dead.

Not to mention it took 10 minutes for my beer to get ordered due to their "ID Procedure." Although, to be fair, I think that location was busted for selling to a minor, so maybe they had to fax it in to the police or something for verification.

Chains, boys, you get what you pay for. The whole point of them was - I guess - you'd never get variability, only consistency. Guess what - you were suckered.
Dump these places for a local place. They won't try to blatantly hoodwink you, the food's made from better ingredients for damn sure, and if you complain, they'll fix you another one.
If there aren't a lot of them around your 'hood, frequent the ones that ARE there. Others will gradually spring up at the expense of the Borg restaurants: the magic of the marketplace.
On a macro level, they keep your money circulating in your local community instead of shipping it out to Wall Street.

Else, line yourself up for another and softly mutter, "THANK you sir!"

@monkey1976: While I feel for poor people living in Third World squalor around the world, to compare our lifestyle with theirs is just silly. See the thing is, we don't live in Haiti and we are not paying for the pleasure to eat something that just looks better than a dirt cookie. If "looks better than dirt cookies" was the standard of food measurement in America, we all might as well eat out of a dumpster.

It is a disgrace that in this day and age there are people still living in huts or having to eat dirt cookies. But you don't help people by lowering your own standards. You help them by raising theirs.

The Applebees on our side of town has had fairly consistent food, yet still you can tell most of it is frozen prefab. There is always a 30-60 minute wait to get in. The combination of blah food, long waits and high cost for what you get we just don't bother.
We have had to hit Applebees on a few road trips because in some of these middle of nowhere towns your options are McDonalds or Applebees. The quality of some of these small town locations was horrible, I can see how someone could get a mess like that sundae at an Applebees. So we have started adjusting our trips or bringing food with us if we have to travel by car.
As for Ruby Tuesday, after both of us getting a massive case of food poisoning we won't go back. Famous Daves is generally pretty good but our local one has gone downhill. The last time we were there on a Friday night it was dead, the service was extremely bad and food quality had gone down.

On the upside we have found some great local restaurant lately and try to go back there instead.

Two bucks for what looks to be a shot glass of plain vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup and aerosol whipped cream? That's a rip-off even if it's well prepared.

@PoleMan14: If the server is annoyed enough to do that with any legitimate complaint, how do you know they didn't already do it?

Seriously, if you've got a legitimate issue and you don't act like an ass about it, most sane employees won't mind. e.g. "Erm, excuse me but I don't seem to have any fudge sauce in my sundae (points to big gap in glass)" rather than "Are you stupid? Get me another now and this time it should have sauce!". The second will get you bodily fluids, the first an apology and a new sundae.

Also, what makes you think that the employees won't see you get out your camera and taking pictures of the sundae and decide to put stuff in your coffee anyway?

@PoleMan14: Uuummmm mgy has obviously NOT worked in the restaurant business because I thought Waiting was pretty accurate! I haven't eaten at Applebees in over 5 years. Lets just say that quality over quantity is more important to me. Applebees service is terrible as well, they couldn't care less about you. @monkey1976: I thought about the dirt cookies thing in Cuba too and you know what? THATS IN CUBA NOT here. People that have the money to spend in an Applebees deserve the right to complain if something isn't up to par with what they ordered. Lets not forget many of the main courses are over $12.00.

@monkey1976: Did someone pissy-wissy in your foody-woody today-woday?

If you don't like people complaining about bad service, what are you doing on a site called "consumerist"?

Why would you complain on here instead of simply demanding that they fix your sundae in the restaurant? If I were in the customer service industry, I'd be mad if you didn't tell me you were unhappy with my service. If I then neglected to give you what you wanted, then you could complain all over the place.

This is an inflated complaint that should never have been. For $2 they might have even given him a new one.

I stared at the pictures for a while, trying to figure out what was actually Consumerist-worthy here. Not enough fudge? Couldn't you politely ask the server to bring you some extra in a separate dish, so you could add it as you liked? Since that wouldn't involve having to remake the dish, they'd probably do it happily.

As for not matching the picture... the ice cream scoop seems to be stuck a few inches above the hot fudge. Wanna bet it would look like more if it did?

@Lambasted:

And those living in third world countries actually KNOW proper cooking techniques, and are gifted to have the knowledge to cook an animal or food item from start to finish - rather than walking a box out from the freezer and dumping it into a fryer.

I like watching Anthony Bourdain.

I saw the movie "Waiting" and having worked in many restaurants, I felt it was pretty accurate. I would never send something back to redone.

Just take it off the bill and never go back to that restaurant. Not too hard.

That would be because Jose ordered an ice cream, with chocolate on top, and then started crying on Consumerist.

Many years ago, I worked at a private, family owned restaurant. A customer ordered a steak rare, and it was delivered to them between Medium & Medium rare. The waitress was called over, and the customer nicely expressed their displeasure with the preparation of the steak, so the waitress brought the steak back into the kitchen and relayed the message to the chef...

The chef was clearly pissed, took a knife, cut is finger, and while squeezing his blood over the steak said "If they wan't rare, I'll give them rare", and handed the steak back to the waitress.

The waitress half stunned and half scared for her life, left the kitchen with steak in hand and told the owner what happened. Thankfully, the chef was immediately fired.

The general rule in the restaurant industry is you can send something back once with a reasonable request (like you ordered something Medium well, and it came out Rare), but never send it back twice. You never know what you will get.

I used to love going to Applebee's when I was in high school (about 10 years ago), but last time I went... it wasn't that the food was bad, it just wasn't any good. So I haven't been back in probably 3 or 4 years.

@Rachacha
Never complain twice is a rule of thumb everyone should follow. Unlike in a store where there is not much an employee can do to retaliate against customers, I know what they do to the food of disgruntled customers in restaurants. Thus, when I don't like the food at a place, I just never go back. Complaining in a restaurant is only for the adventurous who aren't too picky about what they eat. I happen to prefer my food sans spittle.

Yep, the second batch of horrid wings sat on the table. I didn't eat them but I didn't dare send them back again. I knew what was going to happen to the rest of my food if I did. Spit-spat.

$2 for a 1/2 sundae is a bargain!

If that's a camera phone pic, pretty nice res. If that's a digital camera, do these people walk around with it waiting for situations just like this to use it???

that half eaten oreo looks delish.
i wonder if he gotten on of those too!?

@ZukeZuke: "Do these people walk around with it waiting for situations just like this to use it???"

I believe you already know the answer to that, my friend.

Some of the things people write in to complain about are truly laughable. People need to grasp the concept of: Not every offense has to be offensive. However, the good thing about nitpickers is companies are on notice that their every move is being watched and reported online. Though the fatigue affect of over-reporting can dilute the effectiveness overall.

Josè got what he asked for, an Ice Cream Shooter. I just didn't expect it to be in a shotglass.