Bootlegger’s Sports Bar & Karaoke Lounge

Stopped in for wing Wednesday while in the area and wanting to try somewhere we hadn’t been.
Walking in, this place is huge! Loads of tv’s a few pool tables and a surprisingly ample VLT area tucked in the back. For wing Wednesday, I’d say it was a pretty good showing with the place a little more than half full. I should also mention that the noise level was pretty perfect here, good hum of people chatting and music that wasn’t too loud — which is pretty awesome for a place this huge.
At 39 cents a wing, the wing Wednesday deal is not the most rock bottom deal in Calgary. However, there are loads of flavours to choose from (I was basic and chose hot, lol) and ranch runs you an additional 75 cents. The wings came out fairly fast and though they had the right amount of sauce but they weren’t the crispy wings I was after.
Bootleggers was alright but in the end it was a pricey wing Wednesday. It’s interesting they have a wing special three nights a week, including bottomless wings on Thursdays (see Chris P.‘s review!), maybe one of those nights is a better deal.

A lot of reviews described this place as a dive bar. I don’t see why i guess. Service was decent and the wings were good. Not anything amazing but good.

I came here for the first time in about 8 or 9 years.
My brother and his friends hit this place up once a month or so for wing night. For $ 12 AYCE wings it seems like a good deal. Combine that with their current setup of trying to be a sports bar and that would make it better.
They have a ton of wing sauces and rubs, most of which are good. Unfortunately the wings on the night I was there were not good. The sauces helped hide the mediocrity of the wings, but overall they weren’t good. The first batch that we ordered came out cold. Its not that they weren’t cooked, just more like they were sitting for a long time in the window waiting to come to the table. The second batch were better, but my brother commented that they still weren’t up to par based on their previous visits. The wings are also a little small. However considering they’re AYCE this is the one time in your life where size doesn’t matter.
Our sever was probably the least pleasant part of the visit. When I first arrived she was prompt in getting to the table and in getting the first round out, but her attitude seemed that we were holding her up from something more important than her job. After the first round of wings came out she was gone for a while. Over the few hours her presence was sparse and barely came around in time to see if anyone needed another drink. I don’t think she bussed our table once. At one point near the end of our visit another server was passing by and saw the number of empty glasses and cleared our table for her. Maybe she got the hint or maybe the other server said something as the next time she came by she cleared the table of any remaining empty glasses and baskets.
Finally, I found drinks to be expensive. A rum, two beers, wings, and 2 Coke’s with tip came to almost $ 50. Their beer selection is garbage. If you like light beer or light beer then I guess you’re fine, but if you like beers with flavour then you should try to sneak in your own. Beers are over $ 8 and they charge $ 2.50 for a pop refill.
This all being said, I would come back here if the guys were going for another wing night, but I would try to steer them to Buffalo Wild Wings for their Thursday wing special instead.

The food was great.
The waitress seem a little overwhelm. Getting drinks and condiments were difficult.
The wings were fabulous and a huge variety.
Will give it another try.

Food was great, service was quick. We had a group of 20 on a Saturday night and we had no problems with our service. Highly recommend for a good fun night out!

Okay, I tried this bar multiple occasions to try and give it the benefit of the doubt but, no this bars a no go for me. The food is alright, it tastes pleasant but the portions are small and expensive. The much bigger issue to me though is the horrible customer service, my husband was accused of lying by a really rude server so we brought it up to the management and all we got back was rude and unprofessional attitude. On more than one occasion we’ve had rude servers, slow delivery, my friend had a long blonde hair in her food (she’s brunette), and then last round we were even ignored so the waitress could hit on a guy playing pool. Of course if you bring it up to the management you get completely brushed off. Add sub par food with horrible service and you get a recipe for a undesirable bar, thanks I’ll take my business elsewhere.

Ordered 3 different tap beers they were all flat and gross. Good wet wings but the dry wing rub is the stuff ur popcorn brutal. Decent service but not goin back

What a place… People watching at its finest. Lots of white trash but I love the all you can eat wings. Always a good place to watch live fights.

So you sorta have to get past the fact this place is very dive-​y looking… Like really dive-​y. It always looks slow and dim inside, so be expecting that (at least on Tuesdays) Plus, the wait staff is hit or miss. BUT! The food here is actually pretty good.
Since I live in the area my boyfriend and I have been here several times for the Tuesday night $ 5.99 two topper personal pizza special. This is delightfully greasy and filling! Plus, for 6 dollars how can you go wrong!
Keep in mind I said the wait staff is hit or miss, a few of the waitresses are slow and rude (well at least very curt). Most of the time when we go, we luck out an get a pretty good server.
There is also a large selection on video slots and pool tables, couldn’t tell you much about them… But hey! They’re there!

Fun place for an after work hang out and drinks. This place has everything; food, drinks, slot machines, games, and karaōke area. Definitely try the fried macaroni.

Good:
–We were seated right after our id’s were checked
–i really like the food here, love their yam fries and wings of course. ($ 0.30/wings on a Wednesday wing night)
Bad
— hate that Im only giving 2 stars to this place but I can’t help it. Our waitress sucked so bad. Wasn’t able to get her name but she was rude. Ughhh.
— 30minutes later after being seated. She passed by us and looked confused when I asked her to bring the yam fries to us before the wings coz duh we’re starving and we need our appetizer.
–10 more minutes later at last our wings have arrived. We ordered 60wings but only received 50 which can only mean one thing, our server didn’t get our order right
–it took 40mins before we could eat the wings and we were expecting it to be hot, as in fresh, just out off the grease hot. As in sorry you had to wait long but it’s gonna be worth it hot. But no! They were just about warm. Not even!!! And the place isn’t even busy! I dont understand why it took that long.
But like I said, I like the food here so I’m still going to come back and hopefully next time our waitress won’t be as rude and stupid as what we had tonight, and they’d be a bit faster on serving food

Wow… this place has horrible customer service. The waitress was rude, slow and thought she was funny; she was not. We ordered nachos as an appetizer only to find it had little to no cheese on it. Twice we were asked if they could take our menu because they were short for other tables. Save your money and go somewhere else.

What is turning out to be my usual Unilocal review, discussing other reviews versus a recent visit. I was there with a large group (on a fight/​PPV night) for Karaōke.
A lot of the reviews previously focus on the service level. It seemed pretty clear to me last night that mgmt. has taken this to heart. There was a lot of active management going on last night. Meaning the supervisors were involved, helping, organizing, etc. They weren’t doing that thing where they just schmooze with the regulars. You could see how this helped, as it was _​very_​busy in there, but no problems with drink orders, food, anything. Often the food was brought out by a different server, which is always a good sign, in that it shows they are functioning as a team.
It could have been very easy to mix things up, as our group had a habit of shuffling around. No issues, though. Drinks right, bills correct. All food was prepared (and tasted) great, and dishes removed (somewhat) promptly.
The wait staff was professional-​friendly, not that ‘I’ll flirt with you to get a bigger tip’ friendly, which I must say I prefer.
Of course, you have to put a ‘but’ in here, and it has to be the phalanx of smokers you had to walk through to get in the front door. I felt like I was back in high-​school. Get rid of that (which is obviously a first-​impression thing) and you’ll have even more stars.
Summary: better-​than-​average bar food, very clean, good and attentive service. I will say, though, it’s loud.

Came for wed wings night @ $ 0.25 /​wing.
FIFTY wopping flavours to choose from… They are so kind to categorize them under 1) BBQ 2) Hot & 3) worldly hahaha.
We tried 8 flavors.
The dry ones seemed to have powder (maybe along the lines of kernel’s popcorn powder) flavor sprinkled on them. I liked dill pickle the best of the 8 I tried.
The place itself is slimey… hahah… makes you feel kinda dirty.
The waitresses are dressed in their skimpy outfits (yes I know it’s a lounge/​bar).
There seemed to be a lot of single guys just sitting around staring and ooogling eyeballs all around… slimey… bleck…eyeballing … bleck… The guy at the next table was practically h*mping the waittress and flirting with her for a whole hour, and then lo and behold his girlfriend arrives and switches modes and is having a dinner with her holding her hand… Slime ball.

I went two weeks ago on a Friday night. The karaōke was great. The host was a lot of fun, and a great selection of songs. The service however was horrible. The waitress took 20 minutes to even acknowledge us. Once she did, she only brought one drink, and it was wrong. It took another 20 minutes for her to come back to re order the drink she forgot about.
It wasn’t just our table, the gentleman sitting next to us ordered a beer with a side of Clamato, and it was completely forgotten about. Finally another waitress came and re-​took his order.

If I called the service poor I would be doing them a favor. We came here for the March Madness final, and the game wasn’t even on, so we had to request them to change the channels… which they did, though it was as if we asked to watch women’s college basketball during the Stanley Cup, with Calgary up 3 games to none…
I tried the «ribs» which were deep fried rib-​nubbins of some sort, about 20 to a basket. When I asked the waitress prior to ordering, I got zero explanation. If you’re curious, they’re ~1″ long, ¼″ thick, probably the rib ends. They’re deep-​fried, not tender, and overall just challenging to eat. But on Monday nights they’re $ 2.50 a basket, so have at it. Flavors were decent but I would not get them again.
The wings were okay, but there are some weird rules where certain flavors are for wings, others are for ribs, but it’s not differentiated on the menu. This place might get better during the evenings, as it looks like a night club /​strip club, but for dinner, this place sucks.

I used to work in the NE and frequented Bootlegger’s for after work drinks. I haven’t had a chance to check this place out since I’ve relocated and they renovated, so I suggested coming here when we decided to do a wings night.
My boyfriend and I had read some reviews, and they weren’t too positive about the service or the food but I was ready for their 50 different flavor of wings.
It was pretty busy, and we got seated at a bar bench table for 6 with 3 strangers. This was kinda weird, the only time it’s allowable to sit that close to strangers is on transit or dining at Costco — amirite?! Lol
Our waitress came and told us the specials (25 cent wings and happy hour till 7 — sweet!), took our drink orders and suggested her favorites of the 50 different flavors for the wings.
We ordered teriyaki, ketchup and sour cream and onion. And they came out pretty quick and were still piping hot! The ketchup and sour cream were seasoning (not sauces) and they were surprisingly close to the seasoning you’d get for chips. I thought they were pretty good.
The waitress came by a couple times to check up on us and we were never left with empty drinks.
Compared to what Bootlegger’s looked before (dingy and full of VLTs), the renos classes the place up a bit — open, warm lighting and clean.
I’d for sure be back if I’m ever in the NE for wing night, I’d like to try some more wing flavors!

I’ve only ever been to Bootlegger’s for karaōke. But it’s got a good song selection and if you’re there on a week night, chances are good you’ll get a few rounds at the mic. I also like that the karaōke happens in a separate room from the rest of the bar. It’s not completely closed off, but it certainly doesn’t make for any competition between the sports watchers and the singers.
Service is usually on par. Just watch out for the pizza and nachos. The smell of all that melted cheese wafting over from other tables is enough to make even the fullest of stomachs grumble.

I went here for the Stanley cup finals. The server in the front was horrible. She wouldn’t seat us and there were so many empty tables. Luckily we got a seat with some other friends there. We did find out that it was wings night and $ 3.75 hi-​balls. We ordered 50 wings for $.25 each and they had like 20 different flavors too. The downside was you have to wait 45 min for them. The Wings were pretty good but too bad they gave us to many drumlets.
The whole interior was renovated, it’s much more chic than the last time I was there. I had a good time and would definitely hang out here again for some cheap wings.

This place has an AMAZING set up. Absolutely phenomenal, probably the best I’ve ever seen to be honest. There are pool tables, fooseball tables, VLT’s, TV’s set up in awesome locations, great roomy booths, the bar is set up in a perfect location, and the menu and food (quality & price) is AMAZING! Honestly when you walk in you feel like this is the place to be. I would love to give this place 5 stars just for the set up. They have amazing drink specials and food specials daily as well, it can turn out being a very cheap night for food and alcohol.
However… I can’t because the front of house staff does not match the exceptional setup.
The positive things they did:
–Inform us of drink/​food specials
–Admit to confusing two similar named entries in the system and punching in the wrong order
The negative things they did:
–Mess up multiple orders, though writing them down. Apologized but still «sold» them to the table
–Our server was pretty nice, just a little flustered, but the people who came out to bring food were very rude, rolling their eyes at the confusion over the food we hadn’t ordered, tried to push the food into our hands so they could get back to what they were doing though they weren’t busy that night
–We stated we had a serious seafood allergy. Server didn’t acknowledge the allergy but indicated «no shrimp» in the order. Allergies usually require an alert in the kitchen so that no cross contamination occurs however they didn’t take that precaution even though we specified more than just «no seafood». When they messed up our order they gave us other food and didn’t specify the allergy
–No drink refills, unless requested
–Confusion over who ordered what on the final bill (extra drinks, extra food). Unnecessarily arduous process. Not very nice about it
–Forgot drinks
Overall I felt more like an inconvenience at this restaurant than a valued diner. I’ve worked in the industry enough to know when a table is being a pain in the butt or not, so I felt we were fairly gracious despite all the mess ups and didn’t ask for more than a normal table would. I think they need to spend a little more time on the hiring process, I definitely had a very negative feel from all the front of house staff at this restaurant. It could be a really hot spot if they could have consistent servers, like I see a lot of people have mentioned already. As an ex server I was fairly horrified by the level of care that every front of house member we dealt with gave. For service, I would have to give this place 1 star… but the layout and lounge/​bar itself are so amazing and have so much potential I will give it 3 stars, because I encourage people to go for sporting events, just don’t expect good service. Even the person handing out change for the VLT’s was rude and impossible to track down. Having worked at busy bars downtown I can say the ratio of servers to people was not low enough that the service should have been so horrendous.