Tatiana A.
Yelp
TL:DR; The lasagna was delicious, the service left a lot to be desired. We wanted to love this place, but in all honesty, we didn't have a great experience. We needed to cater a party for our small nonprofit yesterday, and wanted to support a local family owned restaurant. My initial communication was via email and went fairly well. I was looking for a vegetarian entrée, and happily I learned that their lasagna is made vegetarian by default. They recommend buying meatballs if you want meat with it, or you can also purchase a meat sauce. I ordered a full pan of lasagna, which I learned they make without the sauce, (apparently some people prefer it that way). So I also had to purchase 2 quarts of sauce. We also needed some good bread for the party, and I had planned to get that at a bakery, but when I saw they made hard rolls, I thought that I could save myself a trip and kill two birds with one stone. So I ordered two dozen hard rolls and butter cups. The party was at noon, so I asked to pick everything up at 11:15 AM.
When we got there at 11:15, our order was not packed and ready. Additionally, the proprietor realized he forgot to thaw out the hard rolls. They offered to just nuke them in the microwave and send me along with them. I told them the venue does not have an oven so there's no way partially thawed rolls are going to work. If they had apologized at this point and tried to make things right, it would have gone a long way toward our good will. But they said "how about this sliced white bread instead, it's less expensive anyway", and we were out of time, since we had to go set up the party before the guests arrived. So I said OK fine.
Then he starts ringing us up, and I object because none of the prices seem to match what was on the website. I had a specific budget to stick to, not spending my own money, as it was for the nonprofit we volunteer for. I meticulously researched places all week in order to stick to the budget. Never once did we get an apology for the incorrect pricing, and he did not try to make things right by honoring any of the prices on the website, either. (i.e. the hard rolls were supposed to be $4.99 a dozen, the white bread was not cheaper at $5.39 a loaf). I get that they are a small business and they need to make a profit, but customer service should still mean something. It's just wrong to force a customer to pay more than your advertised price. We didn't have much choice at that point, so I decided to just pay for it and get out of there. My husband was offering to pay the extra out of his own pocket, which is also wrong. We ended up being late, because all of that back-and-forth while they were packing up the order took 15 minutes. He kept saying he had emailed me a photo of the receipt, but I had not seen that last email. When I saw it today, the total was within our budget, I think because he forgot to put the hard rolls on there.
The good news is the lasagna was a hit, everyone said it was delicious, and we barely had any left at the end. The red sauce was tasty, and even had a bit of heat, which was a pleasant surprise. But no one ate the bread. It wasn't anything special, just kind of your basic sliced white bread. But the unpleasant pickup may have soured our group on using them in the future. Probably not really worth making a couple extra bucks if you're losing a group of potential future customers.
