Like every other restaurant in town, TGI Friday's in Blanchardstown is looking for staff - but to be a waiter here you have to be prepared to make a bit of an ass of yourself. First there's the glaring red and white striped top, then on top of that there are silly braces covered in badges and light-up things, with stick-on spiders, or cutesey animal knapsacks hanging out behind. To top it all off there's a hat. Any old hat, it seems - a rain hat, or an Ali G. hat, a tea cosy, a peaked cap, a Tibetan knitted hat, whatever. When you have all that on, you are ready to serve. The get-up tells customers TGI Friday's (TGI stands for Thank Goodness It's) waiters are kooky, fun kind of people, and that's fine so long as they are nippy on their feet.
They're certainly meant to be nippy. A typical TGI Friday's bar person is supposed to be able to make more than 500 cocktails from memory. Part of the trouble at TGI Friday's in Blanchardstown is that waiters are all bells and whistles and very little else. The night we visited, the service was friendly enough but murderously slow - not what you expect from a slick American chain (there are more than 600 TGI Friday's worldwide with revenue of £2 billion-plus a year). Blanchardstown opened in February and a brand new TGI Friday's is due on St Stephen's Green in the former Chicago Pizza Pie premises (that is, if they can find enough staff to wear the silly hats and braces).
Expect the usual features for this kind of chain - a long wait for a table while you order expensive drinks at the bar; tons of ice in the glass so you get rather less drink than you want; chunky laminated menus that go on for ever but really only offer chicken or beef; massive gooey desserts with several spoons to go around; and waiters who tell you their name before they take a drink order.
The Blanchardstown restaurant has an excellent location in the Leisureplex complex, across the road from the cinemas and shopping centre, so there's a captive audience of families and dating couples. It has a glitzy entrance with neon poles in pink and yellow and green guiding up curved shallow steps that create a sense of glamour so you feel like you're going to a movie premiere instead of a burger and chips joint.
Arriving at 7.30 p.m., I was told they were heavily booked and that there would be a 30-minute wait, at least, for a table. Yes, alright, show me to the bar, even though there was a swathe of empty tables at the other end of the room . . . "Oh that section is closed off tonight". Etc. etc.
At the bar, there's no pressure to buy a drink, however, and plenty of high tables. Propped up at one I asked three different waiters for a menu and finally got one after asking one of the managerial men in pale-blue shirts who circulate the room troubleshooting. It being early, there were still lots of families having their tea, and being showered with balloons before they left. Elaine, Peter and Henry arrived just in time for us to get our table, which was away from the buzz of the centre of the room, right up against the closed-off section. A nice young woman with striped headgear told us her name was Zoe. She also didn't mind if we changed tables since the air-conditioning was blowing down Peter's neck.
The next table was better for him, but now the draught was coming down my neck. Whatever. Even with it, there was an overwhelming smell of deep-fat-frying hanging in the atmosphere. In front of us, tacked to the wall, was a set of skis, a pogo stick and various tin advertisements for drinks and household items that haven't been heard of for 50 years. This is standard TGI Friday's decor, along with the Tiffany lamps hanging down over the tables in the more attractive front section.
There's a colossal cocktail menu and the drinks are reasonably priced. You can get a champagne cocktail, a margarita or a frozen black Irish for £4.25, a whiskey sour for £3.55 and a large selection of booze-free flings for just over £2. Nobody seemed to be drinking them, however - it was a particularly wet and miserable night - and we stuck to wine, beer and a Coke for Henry that turned out to be Pepsi or, sorry, ice and a bit of Pepsi.
The menu does, true to type, seem to go on forever with choices of nachos, potato skins, tacos, salads, burgers, pasta and a whole range of grilled meat and fish flavoured with Jack Daniels. Henry (aged 12) started with a Caesar Salad, and to him it was perfection. I had a forkful and it was good if you like loads of creamy dressing.
A shared portion of Jack Daniel's Wings wasn't so hot. We got a handful of scrawny wings coated in a dark brown glaze and served with blue-cheese sauce and a couple of celery sticks. Peter's Vancouver Chicken was supposed to be tender slices of chicken fried until golden, accompanied by a Canadian honey mustard mayonnaise. The mayonnaise tasted distinctly of horseradish, and the chicken was tough strips dipped in breadcrumbs and fried to hell.
My main course - chicken fajitas (£11.50) - was very good. Four soft tortillas came warm and wrapped in paper under a dish of guacamole, shredded lettuce, grated cheddar and sour cream. The chicken came sizzling on an iron plate set in a wooden platter along with some refried beans that tasted a lot better than they looked, and roasted peppers and onions. The chicken was tasteless but the other components made up for it.
Elaine and Henry had bacon cheeseburgers and these arrived looking flat and subdued, not high-and-mighty like good burgers should be. Measly portions of horrible, lukewarm limp chips were scattered on the side. Surely you can't build an empire on chips as bad as these? Henry was quick to say they had far better, hotter chips in Florida and Edinburgh TGI Friday's - where he had been recently. Presumably the Blanchardstown kitchen has the very latest equipment, but someone isn't using it very well.
Peter's massive baked potato was also cool rather than hot and his fillet steak with a mushroom and burgundy sauce (£13.95) had the congealed look that comes from sitting around under lights until the waiter remembers who it's for.
We complained to Zoe, who looked shocked. She came back some time later with a dish of freshly-cooked fries that didn't taste much better, and she would have replaced the baked potato, too, except Peter said it was OK, he didn't mind it being like that. In the meantime, a chirpy, blue-shirted manager popped over to see us, but was so concerned about not interrupting our conversation, and telling us he didn't want to interrupt our conversation, that he never said what he had popped over for.
Henry had to have the Friday Outrageous for dessert, and this was a really fearsome thing - a slice of God-awful, synthetic chocolate cake, topped with the odd strawberry, ice cream, an obscene amount of whipped cream and then a bar of Cadbury's cut in half with each half sticking out like bits in a car wreckage.
Lots of substance, absolutely no style. Henry loved it but had to give up after a few bites because it was just too rich.
Cappuccinos were good but mean in that the froth stopped about a centimetre down from the cup rim. Maybe some accountant has worked out that if they give that bit less froth in every cup right across the empire it saves thousands. Our bill came to a whopping £83 before service.
TGI Friday's, Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, 01-8225990
