The views outside were beautiful, but I would definitely not recommend dining at the Bistro. We went to the Bickford Bistro for their mother's day dinner, had a reservation for 5:30 and had already let the hostess know we were waiting 15 minutes prior. They had just been cleaning up the last of the previous turnover and sat us at the table about 10 minutes later, along with everyone else who had reservations in that time slot.
Half an hour in, no one had even come by with water or menus - most other tables already had their glasses filled. When one of the servers finally come around to fill our glasses, I had asked for menus and hot water for my parents. She nodded, turned around and promptly began filling glasses at a bunch of other tables, completely ignoring us in the corner. It took another three reminders for her to grab menus for us, but had forgotten the hot water. Asked for it again with lemon and she brought the water without the lemon - every time she came back to bring what was requested, there was no apology whatsoever.
When we finally got around to ordering, the food once again took half an hour to arrive, and no one came around to refill our water (even though we noticed them making rounds at other tables). Someone else had asked us if we wanted to order beverages and I asked to see the wine list, which was not brought to us until halfway through the meal.
The food was mediocre at best. The short rib was dry, the sticky toffee pudding was decent but we were served half melted ice cream. By 7pm they were just coming around to clear up the mains, and at this point we were tired of waiting for prolonged periods every time we wanted some kind of service.
Still ended up tipping one of the other servers that brought us our food, and she was kind enough to apologize when she did admit to forgetting something else we asked for. Their attire was not uniform despite the standard clearly being "black bistro", quite a few servers took liberties with their looks, and for a venue with such a reputation, they came off as extremely unprofessional.
All in all, I would not recommend this place to any of my wedding or event clients looking to book. I thought this would be a nice change of scenery for Mother's day since we haven't been to the area in 20+ years. Other than our stroll in the gardens prior to dinner, this has been a disappointing night.
