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| - I bought a $50 gift certificate to Bananas Ranas on restaurant.com yesterday for $4. I was very excited to take friends out and have a good night. The stipulations of the gift card were that you have to order $100 worth of food, and I figured that 5 adults and 2 kids could do that. Our bill was $116, but most of it was drinks, so we weren't allowed to use the gift certificate. No big deal, the gc made us pay an 18% gratuity, and I was pissed at the thought of being made to pay that for the service we received. (Silver lining, I found it!)
We got there around 6 and stood around for like 10 minutes waiting to be seated. We were handed menus and were almost ignored the entire 2 hours we were there (it should have only taken 1 1/2 hours.) I ordered a tea, which I sweetened with stevia from home. I asked for a spoon to stir my tea and never received one (even though I asked 2 times.) We had 4 orders of "trimichangas" (3 mini chimichangas, 1 carne asada, 1 chicken, and 1 al pastor served with rice and beans), a bacon cheeseburger with fries, chicken tenders with fries, and a grilled cheese sandwich with rice. We also ordered an appetizer platter.
The plates the waitress brought out for the appetizers were DIRTY! They all had buffalo chicken residue on them. They took them back and they brought out coffee cup saucers instead.
The appetizer platter tasted like stuff I could get in the freezer section of nearly any grocery store, but it wasn't awful.
My kids' food (grilled cheese and chicken tenders) came out before ours did, they did fries with the grilled cheese, and when the error was pointed out, the person that brought the food out (NOT the waitress) took the entire plate back and came back with a grilled cheese and rice.)
The chimichangas were really greasy, the beef one was mostly fat, the rice and beans were cold on all 4 plates.
The red salsa was Pace, which in Arizona does not fly, at all.
The bacon cheeseburger was overdone, my friend called it a "twice grilled" burger. I don't know if she didn't like the fries, she didn't eat them.
We had to call out to the waitress for drink refills, and my refill of iced tea came back with something floating in it.
We were the ONLY table there on a Friday night for half of the meal, there was no excuse for the slow service.
We ordered dessert in an attempt to up the bill (not knowing how far from the total we were) and we were told that half of the desserts listed weren't available (oh, excuse me "desert" is what it said on the menu!) My kids each got an ice cream sundae because they were very well behaved, and I ordered a slice of chocolate cake to share with my husband. The waitress said she'd put a lot of chocolate syrup on my youngest's sundae (she wanted chocolate ice cream, but they didn't have any, so I told her if she stirred in the chocolate syrup it would be like chocolate ice cream and she was really excited about that idea) but when it came out there wasn't much on it. The chocolate cake didn't look anything like chocolate cake, because it wasn't. It was tiramisu. Not a bad thing, but not what you're wanting when you order chocolate cake! To make matters worse, it was still semi frozen!
We're not going back ever again and I'm not sure who to bestow the gift certificate on. Who do I hate the most? LOL My husband made me take an oath to check the yelp reviews for all restaurants before I buy another restaurant.com gift certificate!
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