Pier West - Twin Lakes, WI

We stumbled across this restaurant because we just discovered www.restaurant.com. This is where you can purchase discount certificates for many retaurants for a reduced price. For example, we purchased a $25 certificate for $2. The only restriction is that we had to spend $50 total. That is never hard for us to do.

You can search by restaurants in your area and that's how we found Pier West. We were excited - something new to try and it's open on Monday. It's located on Lake Mary, which is small, but it was still a good view.

We were seated right away and offered drinks by the person who sat us. A great start! When she came back with our drinks, we were not quite ready to order, so she said she would return. We kept seeing her waiting on people who were seated outside on the deck, people who came after us. We got to the point where we finished our glass of wine and she still had not come back. Literally it was 20 minutes. Finally we grabbed another server and she apologized, said she didn't know that she was supposed to take care of us. She took our order right away.

We ordered an appetizer, salad and entrees. She brought our salads out first. I hate that! And it happens more and more often. I don't get it. There are supposed to be rules to follow. Appetizers should come first!

We ordered the Seafood Feta Bruschetta, which was shrimp, scallops, lobster (don't really remember seeing the lobster) sauteed with garlic, feta cheese, olive oil, tomatoes and white wine served with french bread. We expected it to come on the bread, like bruschetta normally does, but we had to make our own. No big deal. It tasted great and at least it was more creative than the norm.

For our main course, I ordered the grilled shrimp and my husband ordered the grilled scallops. I'm not sure you can do much to screw up grilled shrimp, so it was as I expected. However, my husbands scallops seemed very bizarre. They were the whitest looking scallops I'd ever seen. They looked boiled rather than grilled. Very unappealing.

We both had the roasted sweet potato which was ok.

I doubt we will ever return.

www.pierwest.net

Ashling on the Lough - Kenosha, WI

If you look at our previous review, you can see that we liked this restaurant, but things have changed.

We don't know if it is the economy or just the lack of traffic in the Kenosha area, but this place is going downhill. I hope they can save it.

Our last three visits to Ashling have been miserable and we are taking it off our list. Two of the last times we went on a Monday since they are one of the few restaurants open on Monday and I seriously was looking for Gordon Ramsay. I figured he must be filming a version of Kitchen Nightmares!

Two visits ago we came in and were seated right away. There were only about five tables total with people at them. Our waiter took over 10 minutes to come and ask us about drinks, then we did not see him for another 10 minutes when he came back with our drinks and took our order. It took 15 minutes more to get our first course, which was a salad. The bad this was this was before our appetizer which showed up while we were eating our salad. During this time we ran out of drinks and we could not get the attention of our waiter and he never returned. Our main course arrived 20 minutes after we finished our appetizer and the bad thing was both meals were cold. We assume it had been sitting at the pass too long.

On our next and last visit we had fairly good service for a change except the food took a long time to come out, but at least it was hot so we know our server was doing her job well. The disappointing aspect was the food quality. My filet was over cooked and my wife;s risotto was not even risotto, it was plain white rice. We complained to our server and we were told that they ran out of risotto and the chef decided to replace it with white rice and he did not tell anyone.

In the first instance we were given a round of drinks at no charge because it took so long for the food and in the second instance we were not charged for the risotto. I can't imagine how they can stay in business if they have to keep comping items to make up for mistakes.

Basically from our observations management of the restaurant has dropped the ball. Serving staff is not trained and the kitchen is out of control.

I hope they get their act together, because this was a great restaurant and they could not ask for a better location. We wish them luck.

http://www.ashlingonthelough.com/home.html