Review on "The Chop House in Unionville"

Okay, so I'm guessing that all of you are kind of like me and don't get out to restaurants all that often now that you've got little ones in toe. Wouldn't it be nice that for the few times that you do go out you are guaranteed to have a good meal?

Well, "The Chop House" on Main Street Unionville certainly isn't the place to go. This restaurant looks very inviting because of it's large patio area, but be warned, no matter what you order, whether it be a soup, salad, entree or even coffee, you will wait, and wait, and wait for it to arrive.

The first time I went to the Chop House for lunch the food was fantastic, so I took my husband back there for dinner thinking that it would be even better. I couldn't have been more wrong. The waiter kept trying to pawn off some Porter House steak (we overheard the manager telling the waiter that they needed to unload it). Needless to say, we did not order that. My husband got a steak of some sort, it was fine. I wanted chicken because red meat wasn't sitting well with me in my pregnant state. Twenty minutes later the waiter came back to tell me that there wasn't any chicken left. Everything else on the menu was seafood or red meat. Tell me how you can run out of chicken when it is your only chicken dish? Of course, we waited patiently, then not so patiently to be served. In the end we filled out our comment card with anything but rave reviews and decided that we wouldn't return.

The next time that we decided to give the place another chance we ended up leaving because we got so fed up of waiting so long to be served by a waiter that we knew it wasn't a good sign of things to come.

Why we tried again, I'm not sure, but we did and this time just for coffee and tea. 20 minutes later they came back without the coffee and told me that they didn't have decaf tea. Great.

Today we gave The Chop House another chance hearing that it was under new management and had a new menu (but this was only after realizing that the restaurants that we wanted to go to were packed). We should have known better. A good 10 minutes passed before we ever saw our waiter and at least 25 minutes until we got some water. Meals arrived after we had been there 50 minutes. My squash soup was salty, so salty that I could barely taste the squash. My salad had only 1/5 of the ingredients advertised in the menu. Disgusted I sent it back and didn't have them prepare another. My husband got butter chicken that tasted good enough, but sadly I saw that it was food prepared elsewhere and simply heated up on site. The rice and peas were dried up and our cold sweet potatoe fries were anything but plentiful for the $6/7 we paid for them. We talked to the manager who couldn't really offer any excuses or apologies and I told him that the restaurant already had a bad reputation amongst the locals. It looks like "The Chop House" is living up to it's bad reputation with flying colours. I did tip the waiter, afterall, she was only one of the two servers taking care of the entire restaurant.

For all it's worth, go eat just about anywhere else on Main Street Unionville and you'll have a much better experience service and food wise.

If you've got some suggestions for great places to eat, or places to avoid in Markham please feel free to post!