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| - Food Quality and Selection - 4 star
Atmosphere - 4 star
Value - 3 star
Overall Experience - 1 star
Overall Rating - 1 star
I just tremble each time I walk into this place because their ordering process is so darn convoluted. On my recent visit there the guy in front of me was departing from his ordering group (I think that's the concept) to come back in the flow to try to put a sandwich on his order. We did the whole polite 'you go - no you go' thing back and forth and my family ended up ordering next and I felt like I was cutting in front of him. Were we?
My family then ordered and I then proceeded to order the advertised Chicken Tortellini and Side Salad. We moved down the line and I told the salad person that I just wanted a basic side salad at which point she said 'which one'? To which I replied 'oh just a basic one here in the photo'. She then tried to continue to explain the menu to me. As this conversation evolved, I realized that my Chicken Tortellini - the one that was pictured - was not a soup but a pasta. After noting this error on my part - I decided I didn't want to have to leave my 'ordering group' to go back to the beginning of the line and ask to barge in to the large group behind us to re-order and the pasta is 'more food' than soup and not wanting to be a glutton asked to cancel the salad. That then became this huge ordeal as I may have already ordered the salad (did I?) and my wife was like 'well get one if your paying for it!' and I am like 'huh? - that doesn't make sense - I don't want one'.
I spent the rest of the meal trying to explain to my family that Paradise stood nothing to gain in 're-inventing' age old ordering processes. That their process is fundamentally broken and that I would guarantee that I am not the person with complaints about the process (Yelp is full of these sentiments - btw). I also explained that common ordering processes are characterized as a set of synchronous processes (where one in the group steps up and completes, the next goes and completes, and so on, and if a change is needed it's made, it is done, and so on, and when you are done, you pay). The person who designed this for Paradise wanted to achieve efficiencies by designing as what is essentially an asynchronous process where different things in the same order can happen all at once (like when your kids run over to bakery when you are at sandwiches and your wife is trying to order at salads) - and that this does work in cafeteria style ordering processes - but they ended up what seems like somewhere in between. I would bet that it is as confusing for employees as it is for customers and that employees are probably not even really trained to the process effectively because it is so broken. As such, the prevailing attitude becomes 'wing it' and it's no big deal and by the time you reach the end of the line the employees and customers end up hating each other. Then when the next good customer comes through the line, the employee takes out all the prior frustrations of the day on the next victim. In the end, the employees - who started out as 'good people' - just start to dislike their jobs and their customers a little bit less and less each day - which kills employee retention. And in the end, the bizarro ordering process makes the whole world a worse-off place to be.
My family, of course, just thought I was making a big scene and made comments like 'Dad - your just getting old and grumpy' and tried to explain the salad ordering processes. My assertions that this is about much more than a salad order fell on deaf ears and my wife stated was acting like my mother (that is a 'major slam' btw).
The experience is fixable. Panera has a similar menu/similar concept and I have never had an issue with Panera. Jason's deli has a similar ordering concept. In both cases, you figure out what you all want. Order and pay. Pick-up some of the food at the end and the rest comes out later. It's simple, streamlined, and easy to understand. Alternatively, they could go with the cafeteria style ticketing process. They need one or the other, but the two don't mix.
Ok - all that being said here is the menu item that brought all of this to a head. The picture on the web it is more clear that the Paradise item is a pasta and not a soup - but from a distance I was thinking it was a hearty soup. It's an honest mistake - but one that was clearly compounded in this case by the multi-faceted ordering process.
Chicken Tortellini Alfredo (the item advertised by Paradise as neither soup nor pasta)
http://paradisebakery.com/whatnew_menu_items.php?random=1277419851957.1
Chicken Tortellini Alfredo Soup...
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/tortellini-florentine-soup/
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