Claim Jumper Makes Me Want to Jump Ship

We went to Claim Jumper in Fountain Valley for my brother-in-law's birthday dinner. While the food was good, the service here was among the worst I have ever received. That is the reason for my poor review.

There were 12 of us and when we got there, we were told it was going to be about 40 minutes, So we went to the bar to get drinks while we waited. It took us about 15 minutes before someone finally came over to take our drink order. The prices were normal for a restaurant and they had a good drink selection. 40 minutes quickly turned into 60 minutes and we still didn't have a table. We were wishing we had picked somewhere else about this time.

Finally about 1 hour and 15 minutes into the wait, we were taken to our table. They tried to fit 13 of us around a table made for 10, especially with their very large chairs. In order to fit everyone in, several of us had to take smaller banquet style chairs. When we asked our waiter, Ryan, for these chairs, he acted like he was being put out. This should have been our warning that we weren't going to be happy with our experience at this restaurant. After 5 minutes of shifting everyone around, we finally were ready for drink orders. Several people at the table only wanted water - Ryan rolled his eyes at this each time. While regular drink orders were received promptly at the table, water didn't arrive until about 15 minutes after everyone else.

The food portions here are so big that my wife and I decided to share on entree, but get our own salads. This drew another eye rolling from Ryan, although we weren't the only ones doing it. The food was ok, not amazing. But overall for a birthday dinner experience, I have to say it missed the target entirely.

I have to say that if we had a choice between coming back here and going to McDonald's I would choose Mickey D's (and I really am not a fan of McDonald's).