I attended dinner at the Vaughan Mills location. The food was fantastic, and the atmosphere and design of the restaurant were also quite nice. This is the extent of my positive experiences at this restaurant, as the remainder of it was quite negative.
Upon arriving at the restaurant ahead of my party I waited 20 minutes before anyone would even speak to me. Granted sometimes it is difficult to serve customers expediently when the restaurant is busy, but to leave a customer standing at the hostess's podium without so much as a "hold on one minute I'll be right with you" is really not fitting of a high quality restaurant. To add, once the hostess did find time to attend her station, she chose to serve other customers who came in long after I had. This had me fuming, though I held my tongue and held out for the possibility that the night would improve.
Once seated, the server had us waiting 40 minutes before taking our orders. No drinks, no appetizers, and once again, no "sorry, just one minute, I'll be right there". Again, in a busy restaurant, I understand that timeliness is not always practical, but there is no reason for customer service to be so lacking. Once our server, Kaitlyn, did finally attend the floor, she chose to serve the table next to us, even though once again we arrived first. This practice of leaving customers hanging and serving them out of order seems to be common at this restaurant.
Once we had finally placed our orders, it only took 15 minutes for two of our orders to come in, which is perfectly acceptable, except that we waited another 30 minutes for our third order. We asked our server, Kaitlyn, to tell us what was happening with our order. She told us she would step into the kitchen to find out what was going on, and then never returned. Again with abandoning customers. Not acceptable in my opinion, but common practice at this restaurant. And again to add insult to injury, our server, Kaitlyn, was unacceptably rude to my party and myself. As she brought us our orders and our drinks, I thanked her for her service but she would not even look me in the eye, much less say "you're welcome" or give me a nod of acknowledgement. The same went for other members of my party: No recognition of their status as human beings. This, I can say, is not common practice at this restaurant because no other staff members at this restaurant were so rude to us.
Our third order, it turns out, had been delivered to the wrong table. I'll go ahead and say that mistakes happen, but one out of three people in my party was sitting at the table for 45 minutes with no food. I won't even bother saying that this is unacceptable.
No compensation was given or offered for any of the above. I expected my party to receive 10% off, or something equally modest, considering how bad the service was, but nothing was offered, and when I asked I was told I could get two free bowls of rice. Again, not acceptable.
I will never recommend this location to anyone. My party and I brought up our concerns with another much more capable staff member who was working the floor that night, and he assured us that this would be brought up during a manager's meeting. Although corrective actions may have a positive influence on the service at this location, I will never recommend that any of my friends or associates come to this restaurant. I am aware that there are other locations within the city that I have been assured provide better service, but even in those cases I will make people aware of the horrible service that I received at the Vaughan location and, as such, I will never be fully able to give any Captain's Boil restaurant a full recommendation. Unfortunately for this business, they have left a stain that will affect not only their own location, but others as well. Business owners and managers need to be taught that they actually need to respect their clients, and that their front end employees need to forward that respect. In that regard, the Vaughan location of Captain's Boil has failed quite badly. read more