My E-mail to the Generous Georges on Duke Street, Alexandria VA

Hello. I have been a customer of yours for over 17 years, to include my annual coordination of a pre-marathon pasta event at your facility in Alexandria for up to 100 people. During the course of the last couple of years I have noticed your service going down while your prices went up, but over looked it because it was a good place to take kids and convenient to our home. My lunch experience today broke the camels back, and I am frankly shocked at how horrible dining at your establishment has become.

I took today off to be with my 2 young daughters and had my husband meet us as a special treat. This rarely happens and we looked forward to it all morning.

The service (if you call it service) was beyond atrocious. Since the sign said "seat yourself" we took a seat. We did not realize that this also meant got your own silverware, locate the highchairs and booster seats (and wipe them down yourself) and then search for 10 minutes for someone to take your order. We also needed to get our own menus (and wipe them down) but couldn't find the children's menu's. Our waitress who never told us her name and wore no name tag or I would certainly pass it on) was annoyed that we didn't find our own children's menus, I'm sorry.

Our drinks came in a reasonably short timeframe, but no straws accompanied them. When we asked a gentleman for them because our waitress was ignoring us, he said that he would get them if we couldn't find our waitperson. NICE. Did I mention that the 2 of them were only serving 9 tables? Not exactly "in the weeds".

I needed to send my food back because my pasta was cold. The girls small pizza which I told her they would be splitting turned out to be a burned and uncutable mini pizza, and the waitress told me that it was my fault I misordered because you have no "small pizza" just a regular pizza which is not what I asked for. We ordered a second mini-pizza which came 20 minutes later with a lot of prodding from me. CLEARLY it was not made a priority in the kitchen. My husband did not tell me how his meatball sandwich was because I was so mad at this point he didn't want me to blow. But, it looked small.

The servers were filthy and I wont even get into the fact that the whole front of the restaurant smelled of urine, I am sure that the health department will take care of both of these issues.

We did get the check after asking for it, but, the waitress NEVER came back to get it. She had disappeared. The same gentleman that was covering her butt the whole meal finally took care of it for us because the girls were really fussy at this point and my husband desperately needed to get back to work.

Generally I would just blow this off, tell my friends NEVER to go to Generous Georges and forget the experience. However, the dismissive manner in which we were treated by our waitress was inexcusable and therefore resulted in my comments. It is a shame that a beloved neighborhood establishment can become such a horrendous dump in such a short period of time.