A letter to Chili's

Just in case you are ever considering eating at Chili's restaurant near the West Edmonton Mall ... this is the letter I'm sending them after we ate there on Saturday night:

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To the manager,

I felt compelled to write to you following our disappointing experience at your restaurant on Saturday night, the 2nd of February.

At the end of a very long day, we decided to eat at your establishment along with our four young and very hungry children. Given that it was a busy night, we were prepared for the half an hour that it took for a table to become available and used that time to survey the menu so that we would be able to order quickly and minimize the time it would take to get food in front of the kids.

Our orders were taken in a reasonably short period of time and then we sat down to await our meals. We didn’t believe it was anything too complicated. Four children’s meals, a plate of nachos and two serves of fajitas.

And then we waited.

And waited.

After waiting for approximately 45 minutes without any sign of food arriving (or even being asked if we might like a drink beyond that which we ordered when we first sat at the table) we started querying how long we should be waiting for our meals. After we asked 2 or 3 people how long it might take, we finally saw some food.

My eldest son’s chicken sadly resembled a charred piece of dried out meat that must have been a long way from the time when it was last a chicken. The fries that he had ordered with his meal had somehow morphed into vegetables (and whilst we encourage and insist on our kids eating their vegetables, my memory fails as to the last time that one of them ordered them voluntarily in favour of fries).

The pizza that my third son ordered was luke warm and looked like it had come straight from a microwave, my chicken fajitas were dry and over cooked and the nachos that we ordered never arrived. When we queried this, we were delivered a plate of chips and salsa.

In discussion with the guy that we’d asked about our meals (we’d given up on the girl that had been serving us) he informed us that we wouldn’t be charged for them given that it wasn’t what we had ordered.

When the bill came, sure enough, the chips and salsa featured, but given it was close to 9pm at night and well past when our kids would normally be in bed, we wrote the night off as lost cause, paid, left no tip (close to compensation for the chips and salsa, but more accurately a reflection on our experience).

Our kids had been hoping for a swim back at the hotel, but the meal took so long that we had to disappoint them and try and get them to sleep so that we might have some sanity preserved for the following day.

All in all it was an extremely disappointing evening instead of the enjoyable meal that we’d all been looking forward to. Given that we were down for only the weekend from Fort McMurray (where restaurant options are limited) and that it was our only night that we were able to eat together as a family, I can safely say that on our next trip, we’ll be looking somewhere else when it comes time to feed the family.

Yours sincerely,