Doesnt matter how empty the place is you still have to stand for some time before getting seated. There are a dozen employees running around just passing you by. We finally seated ourselves and 20 minutes later asked someone to take our order. The employees are very young and obviously not trained. The cook rocks! Food was hot and tasted great.

I go there all the time and the service is great. I went in during a bike night there and the owner himself waited on me. A++++ service

Thanks guys

Food is Great! All homemade - not that frozen stuff. Manager was wonderful - make a significate effort to make sure our party went off without a hitch. WE LOVE Rookies in Ankeny - they are doing a great job and would recommend them to all our friends.

My brother and his family came down to visit and we decided to go to Rookies. I have only eaten there a couple of times before. I usually go to have a few beers. Well I can definitely say I will NEVER go back there for anything! From the time we ordered our food to the time we got it, a hour went by!! They may have had some problems with the cooks by the waitress we had was so slow and forgetful! The first time I was there the service was really bad. At least they can let us know before we go in that it is slow and save you the time, at least that way you feel like they appreciate you. But you don't feel at all appreciated. I would recommend never even bothering this place. Unless you like to spend all night waiting for food!!!

I met some girlfriends at rookies for kind of a girls night out, and had a blast! They were having a special on bloody marys and we took full advantage of it. The bartender was cute and he even got us celery from the kitchen for our drinks. I'll come back every time I'm in Ankeny and watch Charlie "drop the cap!"

This is one of the best places I've been years I will return here often.

This is a good place to watch your sports. The wait staff is excellent and the atmosphere is what you look for in a sports bar.

The food is served hot and fresh and prepared to order.

The tap beer does not leave you with a hang over and the specials are worth the trip.

I went there for the alamo bowl for the first time. I ordered a bucket of beer. The beer was obviously warm when put in the bucket and very little ice was put in the bucket. It made me sick to be drinking lukewarm beer. The waitress was nice but obviously over her head. We originally ordered beef nachos and 10 bbq and 10 mild wings. There really was no sauce left on the mild wings but some was at the bottom of the basket. The bbq wings were good. The nachos were not as good as i could make at home in a few minutes. Later we ordered tenderloins with fries and potato salad. We were never given silverware and i went to the bar and got some. The tenderloins were ok as were the fries. The only good thing to deserve one star is the place is big and nice tv's. If you are looking for a good place to eat, drink, and watch sports there are 100's of really good places in the area and this is not one of them

I would like to give them no stars if I could. I called to make a resveration for 12 adults. They would not take it and told us we had to come in and wait. WHAT a JOKE. Good luck staying open long in ankeny.

Service is very bad. The place is fine if you want to come out smelling like you smoke 2 packs/day. Way too smokey. The food selection is lacking. My family will not be back. Too bad because now with Autograph's closing, Ankeny could really use a quality sports bar/grill. Too bad this isn't it.

A wonderful addition to Ankeny. Great atmosphere, great band, good food, lots of fun! We will be back.

Horrible service! I will never go back. It took 30 minutes for me and my wife to place our food order. Very disappointing considering the fact that I was really looking forward to the opening.

I agree the service is very bad and the servers are young and don't seem to quite understand what good service is. It's a great addition to Ankeny so it's too bad. We do enjoy going when games are not televised at home and the food is actually decent as well as flavor and price. I would never go unless it was to watch a game but overall I think it's a great place and they just need to work out the kinks.

Based on our first visit...we won't be going back. Stopped by for dinner on Oct. 7, around 7pm. The place was busy, but no where near capacity. We were shown to our table, the waitress came by took our drink orders, we got those right away. She comes back, takes our dinner order, then a couple of minutes later comes to our table and says "boy, I hope you guys aren't in any hurry, the kitchen is REALLY backed up!" At about the 30 minute mark she jokes to us about if we are enjoying our dinner, funny the first time, maddening the two times after that. Roughly 55 minutes after placing our order our food arrives. Average at best. No "sorry this took so long" or anything by any of the staff. My One Star rating is because it is a nice sports bar atmoshpere.

My wife and I checked out the new Rookies in Ankeny last night for dinner. We were seated really quickly and got our drink orders in really fast. The food was good. Its normal sports bar food, nothing more nothing less. I had a reuben sandwich and my wife had a tenderloin sandwich. They have a decent selection of beers on tap and domestic and import bottles. Rookies is a cool place to hang out and watch the game. There are two main areas of this place. There is one huge room that's very loud that has 20+ TV's and then a smaller side room where we were seated. This room had about 7 TV's in it and wasn't as loud. We deffinately had a better experience than Rick L said he had in the above review, but nothing special.

If I could rate based on different aspects of the location I would give the restaurant side of Rookies a 2.5 and the sports bar side of Rookies a 3.5.

This Rookies is in a new strip mall in a newly developed part of Ankeny. It's bigger inside than it looks from the outside, and can hold a lot of people. There are TVs everywhere you look, and then some. Big screen TVs are surrounded by smaller TVs, so they could potentially show every college game on the airwaves.

The first thing we noticed is that it's loud. Very loud. There are so many TVs turned up so high that patrons have to yell at each other to be heard. The second thing we noticed is that there isn't a non-smoking section. It's all one, big, open room, except for the game room. It has a pool table and several tall bar-type chairs and tables to sit around.

So the hostess sits us down at our booth, and tells us our server will be around shortly. Ten minutes later, she did. We ordered our food and drinks while she was there, which is a good thing because this visit was the only time she voluntarily came to our table for anything. I ordered a soup with my meal, to be brought out first. The soup came in about 10 minutes, which was 5 minutes before our drinks came. We're now about 25 minutes into our dining experience and we finally get our drinks. Not our food, mind you, just our drinks. When you have small children, that's an eternity. Our food came about 5 or 10 minutes after that. My wife's order was completely wrong. She's ordered a chicken sandwich with beans and fries as sides. She got a pulled pork sandwich with only fries as the side. After failing to find our server to point out the error, my wife had to just eat that sandwich. The food was good, which was really the only positive part of this entire visit.

We got very thirsty while waiting for our food, so our drinks became empty quickly. We'd grabbed our server on her way past our table (she didn't stop to see how we were doing, go figure) to order new drinks for everyone. They never came. We finished our meals. The drinks never came. Nor did the bill. Another waitress picked up our empty plates, and we got her to bring another drink for our kids. We didn't even bother to try to get refills for us, at this point we just wanted to get out of there. But it got worse.

So we're done with our meal, our table is cleared of plates, and we still can't find our server to get a bill. We tell the other server that had stopped at our table that we want our bill. Nothing. The manager walks by our table. We tell him we want our bill. He claims he'll find our waitress to get the bill to us. That was a mistake, we should have just had him do it. It was over 15 minutes after that before anyone ever brought us the bill. It was our main waitress. No apology from her about the wrong meal for my wife, no offer to remove that from the bill, or at least take a couple bucks off for the mistake. No apology for not getting our drinks. I don't even think she realized she didn't get them for us. Then I made the mistake of not giving her my debit card right then, so she escaped without finalizing payment. We waited another 10 minutes to get someone to come back and complete the payment. It was the manager (this was the second time he'd stopped by, which was one more time than what our waitress did), who promised to get our waitress over to finish the job. This was after my wife had taken off across the restaurant to find a server, any server, to complete the payment. The manager had tracked her down and said the waitress would be over shortly. It took over 30 minutes total to just get our bill and pay for it. Our kids got so bored they laid down in the booth and tried to sleep.

We spent about an hour and 45 minutes there, which is twice as long as we needed to. The service was absolutely horrible. Yes, the restaurant is new, but service like that is because of pure incompetence and has nothing to do with experience or lack thereof.