I don't post here often, but I am Steven's (dodgingpotholes) brother, Glenn. Most of the people who are regulars at the Time Out who post or lurk on this forum should know me very well. I can't believe that this has gone on for so long. Since it has I figured that I would address the recent complaints and criticisms that have been leveled against us. This is going to be a long one so grab a beer or smoke a bowl if you prefer before digging in. I know it's early, but I also know how some of you guys are.
I'll mostly deal with josequervotequila's comments since they seem to have dominated recently. Let's start with his first commented dealing with the TOT on Feb 8th:
He obviously has a legitimate complaint, but mostly has positive and humorous things to say about us. What kind of response does he get:
Pretty direct and to the point - Steven acknowledges that it was a problem, apologizes and offers to buy jct lunch on his next visit. Knowing Steven he would take that opportunity to get to know him and ease any bad feelings he had about his last experience. I would like to emphasize is that anyone who has problem whether it be with the food, the service, or the staff should let us know right then so we can do something about right then. Also as of Feb 8th jct thinks we have "fantastic bar food".
The abuse doesn't really start until St Patrick's Day.
No specific complaints now. Apparently the quality of the food has now gone down since Feb 8th when it was fantastic. I don't know if jct actually came in between his last post and now. He claimed that he was not coming in as often. I know for certain that he didn't take Steven up on his offer of a free lunch. He certainly never came in to speak with Steven, Jae (Steven's wife), or me. Also now the place is a shithole which Steven took offence at. He accuses jct of "trying to damage our business and livelihood." He also points out that "we are far from a shithole or grungy cantina."
Jct's response is as follows:
I find jct's arguments completely disingenuous. He says that it "is not a personal attack". I think most people would take it personally if their place of business was called "a shithole". In defending this attack as non-personal he then accuses Steven of having a lack of management skills. Again, sounds personal to me. Steven actually accused him of "trying to damage our business and livelihood" as opposed to making a "personal attack". Since Steven asked that he air is complaints in person but jct chose to continue making them on a public forum what other conclusion can one draw.
He mentions "the new restrictive delivery" policy. I will address this one later in this post. He claims others have complained about the quality of our service and to back this up he claims that, "one recent thread mentioned somebody waiting for an hour for food because there was a large delivery order". Well that was him. I guess he thought we would forget. A weak attempt to make it seem that there is groundswell of criticism about the food and service at the TOT. Again, that was his only legitimate complaint and Steven addressed it directly. As for the quality of the meats, it is exactly the same it was when we had "fantastic bar food". Corned Beef & Cabbage cost 10,000 colones on St Patrick's Day because we bought the best available at the Kosher Center in Pavas. We buy fresh bread every day and often times we have to make a second run in the late afternoon or early weekend. in fact, our most recent second run was on Sunday.
Jct's comments are only appropriate in that we are a business in Costa Rica that services the sports book community. The reason it would be pointless to present his complaints in person is that he has no interest in us actually addressing these issues. He simply wants to complain and is doing a very good job of it. As I write this post, jct has made 31 posts - 20 of them in some way criticize our food, service, building or ridicule our customers an 5 of them are in the inappropriate thread he began about Olga. He just seems like a very negative person to me. Steven by contrast has been a regular participant in both the Costa Rican Chit Chit and Political Forums for over 2 and a half years. So most regulars on these forum have seen all sides of Steven.
On to the random comments about the black tarp and TV situation. If having the black tarp makes our place a dump (BigBrian's comment) or a shithole then guilty as charged. If you are implying something else by your comments then we would take offence. Frankly, we have no problem with the black tarp ceiling and really no one else seems to either. If they did I don't think we would be doing the amount of business that we do. I also find it hard to believe that you would insult us for not being able to afford flat screen TVs from the beginning. We made a conscious choice when we opened to not buy flat screen so that we could afford the monthly charges for four SkyTV boxes with the NFL Ticket during football season and the MLB Package as well as four Dish Network boxes with NBA League Pass, NHL Center Ice, ESPN Game Plan (college football) and ESPN Full Court (college basketball). That's a hefty price tag over the course of a year.
We think that was money well spent because it allowed us to provide even better TVs and more sports services. We opened TOT with seven TVs and no flat screens. For the 2007 NFL season we had four SkyTV packages with the NFL Ticket that meant we could show up to six NFL games at one time including the game on Dish Network out of New York and the game on Amnet out of Denver. For the start of the 2008 NFL season we had nine TVs including two flat screens with six SkyTV boxes with the NFL Ticket. That meant we could show up to eight NFL games at once. I doubt there is any bar in the Central Valley with a greater capacity - certainly not on the west side. We now have nine TVs with six 42" flat screens. As you can see we are always trying to improve our ability to serve our customers. We are simply not interested in responding positively to people who are constantly insulting us.
As for alienating over 90% of customers, I'm not sure jct has any idea how much our customers spend. Our average ticket price is well over 10,000 colones (most of those being a single person). The reason being is that even a regular like dean_jones who does have one beer and asks for more ice all day loves our food. He often eats at the bar and then orders something to go. People really love our food for special occasions and holidays. On St Patricks we sold out by 7PM 60 orders of corned beef at 10k colones for corned beef and cabbage and 6500 colones for Reubens. Last Thanksgiving we sold about 150 full turkey dinners at 9500 colones and if you ask around we heard nothing but praise. In fact, a huge chunk of that 150 also had our turkey dinner in 2007.
I know there have been some other random comments along the way between dp and jct, but most of those have been personal insults and not comments about the TOT per se. Oh yeah, there was one comment about our blue cheese dressing. We use Kraft Blue Cheese Dressing. Maybe not gourmet, but obviously not tico. We try to use the best products available. That's why we use Heinz Ketchup as opposed to tico ketchup. We also have malt vinegar for our Fish & Chips on Fridays because anyone who really knows Fish & Chips knows that malt vinegar is key.
Now to address our "new restrictive delivery" policy as jct refers to it. As most of you know, we began as The Sandwich Guys back at the end of August in 2006 using this very forum to kick start our business. We started out of a house in Escazu and didn't even deliver to order. As I recall all orders had to be in by 11:30AM and then I would leave the house about 12:15PM to make the deliveries. We moved to a house in Rohrmoser in October to be closer to the concentration of sport books in the Sabana Sur area and began delivering when ordered. We began taken orders from offices sometime around the end of November. You had to order a minimum of three combos for us to deliver. Our cheapest combo then was 3100 colones so the minimum order was 9300 colones. Our cheapest sandwich now is the Terrell Owens at 3300 colones so three of those would be 9900 colones.
Darkness remembers things a little differently then they were:
Starting on Dec 2, 2006 we would come out to Darkness' office with loads of sandwiches every from Saturday and Sunday just after kickoff on Sunday and around that time on Saturday whether someone placed an order or not:
Usually one day or the other would be very big - between 20 and 25 combos sold (never 30, but still HUGE for us at the time) and the other day would be pretty light. We did that every weekend until just after the Super Bowl so just over two months and then never again. Anyone who ordered Monday through Friday or on Saturday or Sunday later in the afternoon had to order at least three combos. After opening TOT we began delivering around September and from the start there was a 10,000 colone minimum for delivery to Santa Ana plus a delivery charge. When we started I believe it was 1000 colones to Santa Ana and now it is 2000 colones. So as you can see there is nothing new about our policy. Had we not delivered to certain books while we were The Sandwich Guys I guarantee we never would have started doing that when we opened the TOT. We are loyal and do appreciate that early business which is why we are still delivering to sportsbook.com which is probably slightly farther than Darkness' office but a more direct route. They appreciate our efforts and have never had a negative word about our delivery policies.
I want to add a few things about who we are and how I conceive of The Time Out Tavern. First and foremost, we are local bar. We are not a restaurant (although i sometimes refer to it that way) and we are not a sandwich joint. Steven and I have had this conversation countless times - we are a local bar with very good food. I have heard enough comments from regulars as well as first time visitors about our food to make that claim despite recent criticisms. I have had many people comment to me that we are like Cheers. My response besides, "Thank you" is usually something along the lines of, "that's because we are a local bar and they are all very much like Cheers".
A local bar is really like a family. It's a bit of a dysfunctional family since we are getting many of you drunk. It's a place "where everybody knows your name". One of our regulars, Cass, refers to us as the clubhouse. This makes us different (but not better) than places like Brad's Grille or Henry's or any number of places. We encourage people to donate items to put up on the walls not because it saves us money (even though it does) but because it makes people feel like they belong and they are one of the family. The Steelers banner hanging over the bar from the black tarp ceiling was brought in by a tourist. Jack was down here twice for a month at a time and loved our place and the Steelers so he brought that down on his second trip for us to hang that up and we did. Steven kind of likes the Steelers, but we are not fans. Some people are surprised to find out we are not Steeler fans because we also have a helmet and a Terrible Towel. We are merely democratic and don't discriminate.
We have a bookcase built by Tavo (who also built our bar, backbar, archway, and new banquet seating in the back) filled with books that people donate. The deal is that if you borrow some books you should donate some books. The music also has a personal touch. I have downloaded all the music and organized it into dozens of playlists on our iPod. When we opened in June 0f 2007 we had about 900 songs on it. We now have over 3500 with about 1000 additions since Christmas. Who knows? Maybe a year or two from now we will have 10,000 organized into playlists. Much of the music I have put on there since we opened is in response to requests or interest expressed by our customers.
Some of the other things that distinguish us a local bar is the service that goes beyond the premises. One of our daytime regulars, Dick, was in a motorcycle accident out in Cartago. He or his wife Liz called the TOT and Steven drove out and stayed at the hospital until he was ready and brought him. Another regular had a heart attack and died in the place he was renting on a couple's (also regulars) property. Steven and Caroline (our daytime bartender) went up and were there for hours so Caroline could deal with the cops and ambulance since she is fluent in Spanish. I have driven people home who were too drunk to drive and then walked back or had someone follow us so the person would have there own car when they woke up the next day. One night Jae even had me bring someone home to stay at our house since he lived out at the beach at the time. I am not trying to toot our own horn. I don't think any of this makes us special. Stuff like this happens every day in thousands of local bars across the United States. Just letting you know what we are all about.
I encourage anyone who has not checked us out to stop on in and give us a try. Decide for yourself if we are your kind of place. We know some people are going to like us and even some are going to love us. There are those who won't be back a second time and those who are going to hate us. We can accept that. We are from perfect. People are going to have legitimate complaints. If you are direct and not obnoxious you will get a direct response just like jct did with his first complaint about his meal taking an hour. Who knows you may end up getting treated like one of the family. If you treat us like garbage and call us "ungrateful fucks" and call our place a "shithole" you can expect that the type of response that Darkness and jct have received from Steven. Personally, when I see him later I am going to encourage Steven to stop responding to this bullshit.
To all our regulars, both on this board and not, we are extend our thanks as always. Thanks to those who expressed there support on these threads - pubguy (who doesn't even live in CR and has only been in twice), VD, Harry Balzac, GODFATHER, halfdaysober, Waynego Tango, Raoul Duke, thebigone, and dean_jones. To any I might have missed I apologize.
P.S. I know that jct has been logged in for over two hours without answering Steven's trivia questions. When does he leave the forum. He's probably trying to find out if someone else can help him answer the questions. Also Jae as an answer to Steven's wife name is off the table since I revealed it in this post. Maybe we'll give you bonus points for her given name instead of her nickname.
I'll mostly deal with josequervotequila's comments since they seem to have dominated recently. Let's start with his first commented dealing with the TOT on Feb 8th:
He obviously has a legitimate complaint, but mostly has positive and humorous things to say about us. What kind of response does he get:
Pretty direct and to the point - Steven acknowledges that it was a problem, apologizes and offers to buy jct lunch on his next visit. Knowing Steven he would take that opportunity to get to know him and ease any bad feelings he had about his last experience. I would like to emphasize is that anyone who has problem whether it be with the food, the service, or the staff should let us know right then so we can do something about right then. Also as of Feb 8th jct thinks we have "fantastic bar food".
The abuse doesn't really start until St Patrick's Day.
josecuervotequila said:
No specific complaints now. Apparently the quality of the food has now gone down since Feb 8th when it was fantastic. I don't know if jct actually came in between his last post and now. He claimed that he was not coming in as often. I know for certain that he didn't take Steven up on his offer of a free lunch. He certainly never came in to speak with Steven, Jae (Steven's wife), or me. Also now the place is a shithole which Steven took offence at. He accuses jct of "trying to damage our business and livelihood." He also points out that "we are far from a shithole or grungy cantina."
Jct's response is as follows:
josecuervotequila said:
I find jct's arguments completely disingenuous. He says that it "is not a personal attack". I think most people would take it personally if their place of business was called "a shithole". In defending this attack as non-personal he then accuses Steven of having a lack of management skills. Again, sounds personal to me. Steven actually accused him of "trying to damage our business and livelihood" as opposed to making a "personal attack". Since Steven asked that he air is complaints in person but jct chose to continue making them on a public forum what other conclusion can one draw.
He mentions "the new restrictive delivery" policy. I will address this one later in this post. He claims others have complained about the quality of our service and to back this up he claims that, "one recent thread mentioned somebody waiting for an hour for food because there was a large delivery order". Well that was him. I guess he thought we would forget. A weak attempt to make it seem that there is groundswell of criticism about the food and service at the TOT. Again, that was his only legitimate complaint and Steven addressed it directly. As for the quality of the meats, it is exactly the same it was when we had "fantastic bar food". Corned Beef & Cabbage cost 10,000 colones on St Patrick's Day because we bought the best available at the Kosher Center in Pavas. We buy fresh bread every day and often times we have to make a second run in the late afternoon or early weekend. in fact, our most recent second run was on Sunday.
Jct's comments are only appropriate in that we are a business in Costa Rica that services the sports book community. The reason it would be pointless to present his complaints in person is that he has no interest in us actually addressing these issues. He simply wants to complain and is doing a very good job of it. As I write this post, jct has made 31 posts - 20 of them in some way criticize our food, service, building or ridicule our customers an 5 of them are in the inappropriate thread he began about Olga. He just seems like a very negative person to me. Steven by contrast has been a regular participant in both the Costa Rican Chit Chit and Political Forums for over 2 and a half years. So most regulars on these forum have seen all sides of Steven.
On to the random comments about the black tarp and TV situation. If having the black tarp makes our place a dump (BigBrian's comment) or a shithole then guilty as charged. If you are implying something else by your comments then we would take offence. Frankly, we have no problem with the black tarp ceiling and really no one else seems to either. If they did I don't think we would be doing the amount of business that we do. I also find it hard to believe that you would insult us for not being able to afford flat screen TVs from the beginning. We made a conscious choice when we opened to not buy flat screen so that we could afford the monthly charges for four SkyTV boxes with the NFL Ticket during football season and the MLB Package as well as four Dish Network boxes with NBA League Pass, NHL Center Ice, ESPN Game Plan (college football) and ESPN Full Court (college basketball). That's a hefty price tag over the course of a year.
We think that was money well spent because it allowed us to provide even better TVs and more sports services. We opened TOT with seven TVs and no flat screens. For the 2007 NFL season we had four SkyTV packages with the NFL Ticket that meant we could show up to six NFL games at one time including the game on Dish Network out of New York and the game on Amnet out of Denver. For the start of the 2008 NFL season we had nine TVs including two flat screens with six SkyTV boxes with the NFL Ticket. That meant we could show up to eight NFL games at once. I doubt there is any bar in the Central Valley with a greater capacity - certainly not on the west side. We now have nine TVs with six 42" flat screens. As you can see we are always trying to improve our ability to serve our customers. We are simply not interested in responding positively to people who are constantly insulting us.
As for alienating over 90% of customers, I'm not sure jct has any idea how much our customers spend. Our average ticket price is well over 10,000 colones (most of those being a single person). The reason being is that even a regular like dean_jones who does have one beer and asks for more ice all day loves our food. He often eats at the bar and then orders something to go. People really love our food for special occasions and holidays. On St Patricks we sold out by 7PM 60 orders of corned beef at 10k colones for corned beef and cabbage and 6500 colones for Reubens. Last Thanksgiving we sold about 150 full turkey dinners at 9500 colones and if you ask around we heard nothing but praise. In fact, a huge chunk of that 150 also had our turkey dinner in 2007.
I know there have been some other random comments along the way between dp and jct, but most of those have been personal insults and not comments about the TOT per se. Oh yeah, there was one comment about our blue cheese dressing. We use Kraft Blue Cheese Dressing. Maybe not gourmet, but obviously not tico. We try to use the best products available. That's why we use Heinz Ketchup as opposed to tico ketchup. We also have malt vinegar for our Fish & Chips on Fridays because anyone who really knows Fish & Chips knows that malt vinegar is key.
Now to address our "new restrictive delivery" policy as jct refers to it. As most of you know, we began as The Sandwich Guys back at the end of August in 2006 using this very forum to kick start our business. We started out of a house in Escazu and didn't even deliver to order. As I recall all orders had to be in by 11:30AM and then I would leave the house about 12:15PM to make the deliveries. We moved to a house in Rohrmoser in October to be closer to the concentration of sport books in the Sabana Sur area and began delivering when ordered. We began taken orders from offices sometime around the end of November. You had to order a minimum of three combos for us to deliver. Our cheapest combo then was 3100 colones so the minimum order was 9300 colones. Our cheapest sandwich now is the Terrell Owens at 3300 colones so three of those would be 9900 colones.
Darkness remembers things a little differently then they were:
Starting on Dec 2, 2006 we would come out to Darkness' office with loads of sandwiches every from Saturday and Sunday just after kickoff on Sunday and around that time on Saturday whether someone placed an order or not:
Usually one day or the other would be very big - between 20 and 25 combos sold (never 30, but still HUGE for us at the time) and the other day would be pretty light. We did that every weekend until just after the Super Bowl so just over two months and then never again. Anyone who ordered Monday through Friday or on Saturday or Sunday later in the afternoon had to order at least three combos. After opening TOT we began delivering around September and from the start there was a 10,000 colone minimum for delivery to Santa Ana plus a delivery charge. When we started I believe it was 1000 colones to Santa Ana and now it is 2000 colones. So as you can see there is nothing new about our policy. Had we not delivered to certain books while we were The Sandwich Guys I guarantee we never would have started doing that when we opened the TOT. We are loyal and do appreciate that early business which is why we are still delivering to sportsbook.com which is probably slightly farther than Darkness' office but a more direct route. They appreciate our efforts and have never had a negative word about our delivery policies.
I want to add a few things about who we are and how I conceive of The Time Out Tavern. First and foremost, we are local bar. We are not a restaurant (although i sometimes refer to it that way) and we are not a sandwich joint. Steven and I have had this conversation countless times - we are a local bar with very good food. I have heard enough comments from regulars as well as first time visitors about our food to make that claim despite recent criticisms. I have had many people comment to me that we are like Cheers. My response besides, "Thank you" is usually something along the lines of, "that's because we are a local bar and they are all very much like Cheers".
A local bar is really like a family. It's a bit of a dysfunctional family since we are getting many of you drunk. It's a place "where everybody knows your name". One of our regulars, Cass, refers to us as the clubhouse. This makes us different (but not better) than places like Brad's Grille or Henry's or any number of places. We encourage people to donate items to put up on the walls not because it saves us money (even though it does) but because it makes people feel like they belong and they are one of the family. The Steelers banner hanging over the bar from the black tarp ceiling was brought in by a tourist. Jack was down here twice for a month at a time and loved our place and the Steelers so he brought that down on his second trip for us to hang that up and we did. Steven kind of likes the Steelers, but we are not fans. Some people are surprised to find out we are not Steeler fans because we also have a helmet and a Terrible Towel. We are merely democratic and don't discriminate.
We have a bookcase built by Tavo (who also built our bar, backbar, archway, and new banquet seating in the back) filled with books that people donate. The deal is that if you borrow some books you should donate some books. The music also has a personal touch. I have downloaded all the music and organized it into dozens of playlists on our iPod. When we opened in June 0f 2007 we had about 900 songs on it. We now have over 3500 with about 1000 additions since Christmas. Who knows? Maybe a year or two from now we will have 10,000 organized into playlists. Much of the music I have put on there since we opened is in response to requests or interest expressed by our customers.
Some of the other things that distinguish us a local bar is the service that goes beyond the premises. One of our daytime regulars, Dick, was in a motorcycle accident out in Cartago. He or his wife Liz called the TOT and Steven drove out and stayed at the hospital until he was ready and brought him. Another regular had a heart attack and died in the place he was renting on a couple's (also regulars) property. Steven and Caroline (our daytime bartender) went up and were there for hours so Caroline could deal with the cops and ambulance since she is fluent in Spanish. I have driven people home who were too drunk to drive and then walked back or had someone follow us so the person would have there own car when they woke up the next day. One night Jae even had me bring someone home to stay at our house since he lived out at the beach at the time. I am not trying to toot our own horn. I don't think any of this makes us special. Stuff like this happens every day in thousands of local bars across the United States. Just letting you know what we are all about.
I encourage anyone who has not checked us out to stop on in and give us a try. Decide for yourself if we are your kind of place. We know some people are going to like us and even some are going to love us. There are those who won't be back a second time and those who are going to hate us. We can accept that. We are from perfect. People are going to have legitimate complaints. If you are direct and not obnoxious you will get a direct response just like jct did with his first complaint about his meal taking an hour. Who knows you may end up getting treated like one of the family. If you treat us like garbage and call us "ungrateful fucks" and call our place a "shithole" you can expect that the type of response that Darkness and jct have received from Steven. Personally, when I see him later I am going to encourage Steven to stop responding to this bullshit.
To all our regulars, both on this board and not, we are extend our thanks as always. Thanks to those who expressed there support on these threads - pubguy (who doesn't even live in CR and has only been in twice), VD, Harry Balzac, GODFATHER, halfdaysober, Waynego Tango, Raoul Duke, thebigone, and dean_jones. To any I might have missed I apologize.
P.S. I know that jct has been logged in for over two hours without answering Steven's trivia questions. When does he leave the forum. He's probably trying to find out if someone else can help him answer the questions. Also Jae as an answer to Steven's wife name is off the table since I revealed it in this post. Maybe we'll give you bonus points for her given name instead of her nickname.
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