"The female bar staff here wear the shortest uniforms I’ve ever seen in a restaurant, anywhere. (The male staff wear regular clothing.) One of them stops every few minutes to yank her skirt bottom down, so it more completely covers her. It’s not sexy. It’s degrading. Her face is blank and white. America’s management calls its bottle-service staff “our team of stunning ‘America girls.’” Young, leering men and old leering suits pour into America in the evenings. If you build it, creeps will come." - Mark H

"One evening, a Wednesday last month, we had ordered the $58 lobster Rockefeller and a $37 plate of milk-fed pork, as well as a bunch of appetizers. The appetizers arrived and we started in on them. And then roughly four minutes later the mains arrived, too. One of the servers kept referring to the lobster as “Henry” – as in, “How is Henry?” and, “Are you finished working on Henry?” I guess he thought it was funny. Henry became work as soon as that server gave it a name. My tablemate ordered a bottle of wine, a $160 Savennières, but the server had never heard of it, and so my tablemate had to search the wine list to find it and to physically point it out. They kept the bottle at a waiter’s station, so we couldn’t refill our own wine glasses. Our glasses sat empty while we worked on Henry and the pork; I had to flag somebody down and explain to him what wine we were drinking to get a top-up. None of this should ever happen in a restaurant, let alone a restaurant where the average entrée price is $45." - Mark H

"The second time I ate at America, I tried to check in at the hostess stand when I arrived. The two women working there were having a conversation between themselves, not two feet in front of me. They didn’t look up. It was as if I didn’t exist. This continued for most of a minute. Awkward. I told them the reservation name; they said the rest of my party hadn’t arrived yet. They showed me to the table. I waited 20, then 30 minutes. My friends didn’t show. I couldn’t reach them. I apologized to my server and said, “I don’t know where my friends are.” Finally I ordered dinner for myself. Forty minutes after I’d arrived, my friends found me. They’d got to the restaurant before I had, and checked themselves in. The hostesses had told them they’d send me over when I arrived. They had been there all along, waiting at the bar. It was as if nobody had ever worked in a real restaurant before." - Mark H