| rev:text
| - I wish it were possible to give negative stars. What a terrible dining experience!
My husband and I just moved to Ahwatukee, and we're visiting restaurants in the area in an effort to find new favorite spots. This past weekend, my mother was in town and we wanted to take her out for a nice meal. Coming from Scottsdale, we were big fans of Fogo de Chao and we were excited to learn that the Brazilian Bull was a similar establishment. Boy, were we wrong!
We went for dinner at 730 on a Friday night, and the place was half empty - which should have been the first sign of trouble. The waiter was very pleasant and explained the concept to my mother, who has never been to a Brazilian steakhouse before. For the cost of $33/person we would have access to the salad bar and all we could eat meat. Drinks and desserts were extra. Knowing we wanted to save room for meat, we each grabbed one plate at the salad bar. I had a devilled egg, some mushrooms, balsamic veggies, and a couple of shrimp. My husband and mother had similar plates, all with room to spare. None of us tried the hot options, which included some sort of stew and meatloaf. The salad bar was okay, nothing to rave about, but nothing to complain about. It's obviously much less of a variety than Fogo de Chao, but what we ate was decent.
None of us finished our entire salad plates, just tasted a bit here and there as we wanted to save room for the meats. When the meat came around, we were brought pork, chicken, and sausage. All three meats were extremely over-cooked and dry. They brought us fried bananas, and they were cold (I'm not talking about luke-warm, I mean COLD). It was clear the food had been cooked some time ago. After one bite of pork and sausage (the chicken didn't even look appetizing), we knew this was not going to work. We have never asked for our money back, but we knew the quality of this food was not worth $33/person. We quietly explained to our waiter our concerns, and he went outside to get his manager.
When the manager arrived at our table, she was defensive and argumentative. We were being very polite and explained the food was not very good. She proceeded to go off on the fact that we had only received the first round of meat, and we should try more. We didn't enjoy what we had (it was honestly comparable to beef jerkey!), and we didn't want to try more and have to pay for bad food. She continued on a tangent about how the meat is not over-cooked, but rather cooked minimally at first, then after each round of serving customers it is placed back in the fire. Well, wouldn't that make it over-cooked with time? My husband apparently made a face when hearing this and she scolded him before offering us a mere 10% off. I managed to keep my cool, and explained we would not be eating anything else and we would not be paying for the meat; however, we would be glad to pay for our salad and drinks. She stormed off to the kitchen, never once offering an apology.
We sat there for a good 5-10 minutes, waiting for our bill. It was a very awkward and bizarre experience, since all of the wait staff starred at us. When the manager came back, she brought us a bill for $58. Yep, you read that right - 3 small plates of salad bar, 1 iced tea and 1 diet coke (Mom had water), cost us $58. I refused to pay that. The manager proceeded to get louder, and my mom asked her to keep her voice down because we did not want to make a scene in front of their other paying customers. (How insane is that?! We were the ones trying to prevent the manager from making a scene!) Apparently she felt we should be charged for the salad bar only, which was well over $15 for dinner. I refused. She then said we could just stay and eat the meat for $33/person, including the salad bar. I refused again. She then said we could pay $9.99 person for salad, which is their lunch cost. Wanting the awful Brazilian Bull experience to end, we gave them $30. We honestly should have stormed out of there and paid nothing after being treated so poorly, but we're good people.
The food was terrible, and the customer service was even worse. I'm not sure if the manager is an owner, but she was the rudest person I have ever encountered. Not once did she appear apologetic for our dissatisfaction, instead she was defensive, argumentative and hostile. I would warn all others before going here, save your money. This is no Fogo de Chao. Heck, it isn't even on par with McDonald's.
We ended up eating across the street at the pizza place. It was awesome, but we were disappointed it wasn't the nice dinner we wanted to treat Mom to. Lesson learned, I will trust my fellow Yelpers going forward!
UPDATE: I would like to add that shortly after I posted this, a five star review was posted by Marco in NJ. When I edited my review to mention that recent reviews were from NJ, his location changed to Phoenix. Untrustworthy!!
|
![[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)