| rev:text
| - I won't be coming back to this Me Va Me again. Long story short? Undercooked meat, long wait time, and poor customer service. Detailed review is below:
I went to this Markham "Express" location for my second time on Wednesday, December 30th at 6:50 pm with my sister and dad.
The restaurant was filled to approximately 50-60% seating capacity. It looked like there was 1 person on cash taking orders, 2 servers bringing food to customers from the kitchen, 2-3 cooks, 1 person making bread, 1 manager.
We ordered two boxes to share since the portion sizes are large: Chicken Shawarma and Lamb Burger. With the boxes (each cost $14.99 plus taxes), you can choose one side and a salad. I made the suggestion to go to Me Va Me (now I'm embarrassed that I did!). I was excited to add a relatively healthy restaurant to my family's usual go-to restaurants.
After you place your order at the counter, you're given an electronic table number and are asked to take a seat. The ambience is decent. It's a casual setting with modern decor. It appears clean because it is fairly new. There are high ceilings, floor to ceiling windows so you can look outside the building as well as see people passing through the movie theatre box offices. You can also see straight through to the kitchen (open concept).
After waiting for about 25 minutes, I was about to go back to the counter to check up on our order but the manager beat me to it. The manager came to our table and apologized for the delay. He explained, "Now, I know you have been waiting a very long time for your food. I apologize. What happened is it was ready and half the order fell on the ground...and we don't like serving food off the ground so we are making a new one." I think that was his way of making a joke...I certainly hope they wouldn't serve food off the floor! At this point, I hoped the manager would offer to bring pita bread or a small appetizer to snack on during the long wait. Or another option would be to bring the salads ahead of the main and side dishes.
Finally after another 15 minutes (now around 7:30 pm, a total of about 40 minutes waiting time), we received our food. It looked delicious with large portions as other reviewers have commented on. My sister took one bite of the lamb burger. Before the second bite, she noticed the centre of the lamb burger was pink/red, slimy and stringy. It was raw/undercooked. The order comes with 3 burgers. We checked and 2 of 3 burgers were not cooked through. My sister brought the burgers to the front counter to show the staff. They offered to cook new burgers. She agreed and sat down again. (Regrettably, I didn't take a picture of the undercooked burgers! By this time, I think we were just wanting to get some food.)
After the already long wait (for just 2 dishes) and seeing the raw meat, we lost our appetites and changed our minds. We also weren't sure how much longer we would have to wait for the new food. We returned to the counter and asked for a refund for the lamb burger box. The manager was mildly apologetic. First, he insisted that the burgers were being remade and offered hummus or other side dishes on the house. We declined the offers. I asked (calmly), "Do cooks use meat thermometers to ensure the meat (especially ground meat) served is cooked thoroughly?" He didn't answer directly or reassure us of the processes to maintain safe food handling practices. Instead, he agreed, "Yes, of course. That kind of meat needs to be cooked through."
Other notes: once we got our food, we asked for glasses of water, an extra plate with a set of utensils, and ketchup. The open concept is interesting because you can see the entire restaurant flow. The server did something on the computer, served another table their food, and chatted a bit with a co-worker before coming back with utensils and a plate. We asked again for water and ketchup, then another staff member came out with that.
Almost an hour after entering Me Va Me, my family and I left the restaurant without eating anything but some fries, a fork full of salad, and a few bites of Chicken shawarma.
Overall, the restaurant flow was disorganized, customer service was not up to par, and I was extremely unimpressed by the undercooked meat. I won't be coming back.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)