rev:text
| - First note that what I need in a restaurant is pretty specific. Good food of course, but more important than that for me is the timing. Every weekday I leave work, pick up the little one from daycare, call a restaurant for dinner pickup, and pull in the driveway as my wife is getting home so we can all have a nice family dinner. I have probably 6-8 restaurants in the usual rotation, but am always looking to add more good ones.
I called Hopdoddy last night from the car for pickup, and was told by the manager who may have been named Brandon that they don't do call ahead orders, but he said if I came in and ordered it would be ready in 10 minutes. My kid is 2, so waiting in a restaurant is near the top of my list of things I like to avoid, but at this point I was already in the car, so even if I stopped for a fast food it would take almost 10 minutes, so what's the harm in the extra couple minutes? Fine, we'll give it a shot.
So to begin, 8 minutes alone in line. I wasn't purposefully timing it, but thanks to a phone call ending as I got there compared to the time on my receipt, the timing was done for me. I don't blame the restaurant for this part; they have two registers to order from, but one of them was taken up for most of that time by a couple in their 80's who must have decided this was the first time they were going to order food from anywhere, or they just liked to small-talk, I'm not sure, but they took forever.
The part that really got me was that we waited 20 minutes after ordering for our food to come out (thanks again to the time on the receipt for helping me track this one). I don't like smoke being blown up my butt by anyone, but 20 minutes with a hungry toddler is much, much more than double the headache of 10 minutes with a hungry toddler, so don't tell me 10 minutes if it's going to be 20. Then to top it off they bring the food on 'for here' plates, despite the two places they had indicated it was take out, combined with the fact that they seated us at their mini booths specifically for take out orders, so we then had to wait while they packaged it up.
Unfortunately this place has worked its way out of the rotation based solely on the fact that they don't take call ahead orders, hopefully that new burger place opening up by Pita Jungle does now that Indulge has sadly closed down.
|