Road Trip

Kristina Lopez

English 1A

16 March 2013

Essay 2

Road Trip

            Have you ever been to a restaurant that is so bad that you say you will never eat there again? I have, the restaurant is called Road Trip Bar and Grill. Its ten minutes from where I live in Esparto, CA and it’s a convenient place to go eat as a last minute meal. When it first opened a couple years ago it was a good little restaurant. It was very convenient for locals, casino traffic and the food was good; but now, it has gone downhill. Road trip is a bad restaurant now because they have bad service, bad food, inconvenient business hours, and are way too expensive. They stay in business because the owner is a tribal member and has a lot of money. Customers try to talk to the owner and tell her their problems but she never fixes them. I wish she would fix the problems but as of now she has lost my business.

            Every time I went to Road Trip I had bad service. We would wait forever for someone to come and just take our drink order, and if you wanted a refill you might as well forget it. After a while people just started getting their own refills at the soda machine. After thirty minutes or so the waitress would show up and take your order. Then when they do come and take your order they seldom get orders right so you always get the wrong food. When you get the wrong food, an hour has gone by and your food is cold. I was there with a large group of people before and half the table was done with their food by the time the other half even got their food. The waitress spilt ranch dressing all over my boyfriend’s sister and didn’t even apologize. If you needed more napkins or anything else good luck, you wouldn’t see the waitress until it was time to collect the money. Even if you are the only person in the restaurant, you still get the same bad service if they were busy. My brother got up and left one time because he waited forever and nobody showed up to take his order. All the workers there were very rude and were horrible at customer service. Because of the horrible service, it’s hard to enjoy the food.

It’s sad because when the restaurant first opened the food was very good. The food was only good because of the head chef. He was a local guy and had a lot of followers when he started cooking at the restaurant. When the owners got rid of the chef the food was horrible and they lost a lot of customers. The food didn’t taste anything like it did before they go rid of the chef. After the chef left the food was cold when you finally received it and it didn’t taste good. If you call and get a to-go order you get half the size. For example, I got the Big Fricken Cobb Salad from there and the to-go order is half the size so they can make it fit in the to-go container, but the price is the same. It’s a total rip off.

            If you wanted to go for dinner on a Thursday night you better make sure you call ahead to make sure they are open. They close down if they have no customers and don’t stay open until the sign says. You never know when they will be open, how late they will be open, or anything. They are much unorganized. It’s really frustrating when you don’t have plans for dinner and you decide to go there. But once you get all the way there, you find out they are closed. When people find out they are closed, they just drive up to the casino to eat. Because of their early closing, they have lost a lot of business to the casino.

            Since they opened the price of the food has been expensive. In the beginning people didn’t mind paying so much because the food was worth it. Now people don’t want to pay $10 for a salad. They started to have dollar burger night on Wednesday nights: a night where burgers, fries, and drinks were a $1. In the beginning the burgers were big and you got a lot of fries for a dollar each. Now they charge more than a $1 and you get less food. The burger is half of what it used to be and you get a small handful of fries. If you want anything extra with your meal, it cost extra. For example, on my BLT I ask for avocados and they charged me $2 for them. If you want extra dressing, they charge extra as well.

            I recently went back to Road Trip Bar and Grill and hoped the memories I had of the place were not true anymore. But unfortunately, nothing had changed. The service still sucked, the food was bad, and the prices hadn’t changed. The restaurant needs to start all over. They need to hire different employees or just train the previous ones to have better customer service skills. If they changed their menu and made better food, it would help their business tremendously. They also need to lower their prices and have set business hours. If they would make these changes, then they would be a good restaurant.