Kaleb E.
Yelp
Well, my wife and I tried this place out for this first time this evening. We wanted something light, but also healthy to eat for dinner. Came across this business on Yelp, so we decided to try it out!
I want to start this review by talking about customer service. This is where majority of this three star experience came from. We walked in and walked up close to the counter to read the menu. The young girl behind the counter just stared at us without saying anything (not that she had to or anything). When we finally decided what we wanted, we stepped up closer to the cash register and she just stared at us again waiting for us to tell her what we wanted... I think the only word that she said the whole time was, "anything else?" When we finished ordering, she finalized our order and the credit card machine turned on. Again, she didn't say anything... I mean we obviously put two and two together and understood that we needed to pay, but what an awkward first experience we just had. As soon as the credit card machine finalized our order, she walked back into the kitchen... I kid you not... my wife and I both looked at each other like, "is something wrong?... did we do something?"
If there is one thing I've learned while working in the restaurant industry for 7 years, it's providing good customer service from the moment a customer(s) walks in your front door. You can have the best tasting food, but if have bad customer service it can ruin the entire experience which then leads to people not returning ever again. Maybe the girl was having a bad day or just didn't want to work that day. Not sure. Either way, we just let it roll at the time. When our bowl and smoothie came out, we walked over to the green space to enjoy them.
I ordered their Nutty açaí bowl and she ordered their Tropical Paradise smoothie. I really enjoyed the Nutty bowl! It was cold and refreshing as should be expected with lots of delicious flavor! The peanut butter was not overpowering and blended well with everything else that was mixed in! I really enjoyed the almonds and granola as well. Both ingredients gave the açaí a nice soft and crunchy texture. I would definitely return for this bowl alone!
As for my wife's smoothie though... unfortunately, it lacked much taste... maybe the right amount of ingredients were not blended together, but it tasted watered down and fruitless(?). We could taste a hint of banana and coconut milk, but that was about it. According to the ingredients, there is mango juice, pineapples and strawberries blended in so we were expecting it to taste like, well, paradise. The drink looked REALLY good, but the taste didn't match its appearance. Like I said, maybe it was just made wrong(?) Either way, it didn't taste like it was worth $7. That price point is more than a drink at Tropical Smoothie Cafe...
I hope that this review doesn't sound like I'm dogging the business, because I'm not. I do hope that the owners or franchisee can take this as a critique to work on fine tuning their quality control and customer service experience. We will try this place again in maybe a couple weeks and order the Tropical Paradise smoothie to see if we had just got a bad batch the first time.