Alanie N.
Yelp
I want to start off this review by saying I am SO sad to be giving this review, especially as someone who has worked in the service industry.
We went for restaurant week, and honestly if that had been my first experience for Nandos, I would have never come back. The two other times I came, were great! But this experience alone completely changed my review of this place.
I want to start with the good, the food! Per usual, the food was amazing. Regardless of the awful experience we had, the food was a 10/10. I've never had a bad dish from this restaurant and I will die on that hill.
Now for the bad, it was restaurant week, and we made a 7pm reservation about 2 weeks prior to this visit. We get there, and they inform us that our table isn't ready and it won't be for awhile. We thought that was odd but figure a while was probably 10-15min after our reservation time. Wrong, we didn't get sat until 7:45. Once we do finally get sat, it isn't until 8:05 until our waiter introduced themselves and took our drink order, at this point it's an hour after our reservation time and we are just meeting our waiter. So we order drinks and our food because we can tell this is going to be a long night. Once he takes our order we see him two more times before the night is over. We did ask for a basket of bread because we're starving at this point; and then we asked for another because it's honestly almost 8:30-8:45 at this point and we still haven't eaten. What we didn't know is they charged us for the second basket of bread we ordered, which fair we ordered it, but as our waiter, why not tell us only one basket is complementary? That was weird considering how long we waited. Our table wanted to keep drinking, and never had the opportunity to order another drink until we were leaving. We didn't leave until about 10pm. No one ever even mentioned all the wait times, no one apologized, no manager came over. Things I'm use to at a restaurant of this caliber, when you have a restaurant charge what this one does, the expectations are just a little higher in my opinion!
It was very clear they were short staffed, the manager's and what I believe to be the owner were also taking orders (which is Great! Amazing leadership to see) but restaurant week is not new to Champaign and it was very clear they over sat walk ins and weren't able to accommodate their reservations which resulted in just an awful experience.
Being a past service industry worker, we obviously still left a 20% tip, simply because I recognize that there was SO much out of the control of our waiter and I imagine the rest of the tables were just as upset as we were and not tipping which is definitely unfair to our waiter. All in all, I genuinely don't know if I will be back after this experience and had a I left a review last time it would have been 5 starts so definitely keep that in mind when deciding to go here, this was my only experience like this, but truthfully it left such a bad taste in my mouth