Indian Punjabi Clay Oven — Restaurant in Ottawa

They have the best Indian food in town no doubt. The customer service has driven us away from our favourite take out place.

Let me first say that we’ve been having terrible customer service here off and on for two years. The first terrible experience was when we chatted with them after a meal and found out they do delivery “Great! We live by Canadian Tire Centre, do you deliver that far” “We do, but the order has to be $50+” Perfect. Not a problem!

It was a Friday night, I was studying with my brother and ordered us food around 6:30/7ish. Order went through fine. Around 8 I’m thinking that it was taking long, so I called them. I was informed they don’t deliver to us, even though they’d taken my payment, I was given two options, cancel the order or go pick it up. I told them to cancel it, they told me they’d deliver it this time but they charged me an additional $10 for an order I’d already paid for, they’d accepted over an hour prior, I had to call and told them to cancel it. By this point we were hungry and just wanted our food, but it kept us away for a while.

For our anniversary we ate in. Food was amazing, service was good. We decided to post a review on Facebook. We outlined the amazing food, that eating in was a good option and pointed some bad customer service. Still gave it a great review 3+ stars. They blocked our review. So now we’re pissed, but we really like the food.

We give it one last shot. It’s family owned. We love supporting local. We all make mistakes. We go for Valentines Day (today). We go in the second they open to beat the rush. It 5:03. We sit down, we know what we want and we order. We order chicken samosas, butter chicken, chicken curry, rice and garlic naan. We watch people trickle in, people coming for pick up. No big deal. The couple behind us order well after us and get food before us. “Maybe it’s because we got an appetizer” we say, we’re not overly bothered yet, but to be honest there’s maybe another 4 people in the restaurant. Samosa’s come and we dig in. I open mine up, it’s ground beef. My partner is digging into his and the middle is cold, I tell him that’s not possible, really hoping he’s wrong, he takes another bite. He puts the meat on the plate and I feel it. Frozen. It takes her another oh...10 minutes before we can wave her down to tell her. She tells me I’m wrong, it’s chicken. I point to mine and to my partners and say “No. His is chicken, mines beef” “Okay, I’ll talk to the cook”. I’m annoyed, I’ve been in customer service for 13 years, you don’t correct them (especially when you’re wrong!) you look into and make it right. By now we’ve been there for 45 mins, we’re both annoyed. We wait longer until our food comes out, she apologizes, I accept, no biggie, I just want to enjoy my dinner and my date. I open up the samosa and it’s BEEF. My partner hands me the car keys and I head out, while he informs them we’re leaving. The best part? She told him again that the beef was chicken.

We’re all done supporting this place. It’s expensive, but good food, but our money won’t go to supporting people who can’t admit when they’re wrong and who won’t try to make a terrible moment right.

On the bright side I know that Little India Cafe up the road is also great food and has great...

Customer service is by far the worst I have ever experienced. It took about 30mins and 7 phone calls later to finally complete my food order. I was constantly hung up on or put on hold as they "had to take another call"....As if my order was less important than the next caller....Then not to mention that the phone was passed around to 2 or 3 different people while I was placing my order and I constantly had to repeat myself because they either weren't listening to me or they passed the phone around so much that they kept missing my order. Since payment method is by cash or credit card over the phone only, just trying to give them my card information was also another mission as they could barely recite the numbers back to me. I was told that due to the busy night the delivery would be 1h 15mins which I was fine with because they had warned me. However after 1h 30mins later I called again to figure out where the food was in which they once again told me they were going "take another call" and put me on hold. Once off hold they said the driver made a wrong turn and would be there in a minute. 20 mins later the driver finally showed up. My husband answered the door and confronted her about the bad customer service and she denied it and said we were wrong. She made excuses for hanging up on us and said they take other callers so they can answer all of them... instead of just finishing one call at a time I guess they would rather have a bunch of people on hold??? She argued with us and was pointing her finger in my face claiming they did nothing wrong and interrupting my every time I tired to speak. We said that we wound not be ordering form them again and she said "good I don't care".... I asked her to leave but she just kept arguing with me. I finally had to shut the door on her so she would leave. She then rung the door bell 2mins later to give me my receipt. WORST EXPERIENCE EVER.

P.s. prices on the website do not reflect actual prices... when I asked for an explaination as to why I was told that they could not get in contact with their website provider, and h was not responding to their phone calls. So apparently they have another website (that I could not find) with to...

REALLY BAD EXPERIENCE WITH INDIAN FOOD HERE.

Worst ever experience with Indian food. The name says clay oven, I don’t think they are using one. I ordered a thali, which typically is a combo, the first impression was really bad as the server denied me to give a side plate to put my naan. Everything was one over the other making it not a very good experience to eat my lunch. Naan was not baked in a clay oven for sure, it tastes like it was precooked, probably the one available in Walmart and Costco. The tandoori chicken usually has less oil, this was immersed in oil badly, like really badly with lots of unnecessary colours which stayed on my fingers like a Heena. There was another dish of chicken which they called bhuna chicken, believe me, I haven’t had a bad bhuna chicken than this. Butter chicken was ok but I’d not give it more than 5/10, many better options available in town. I come from Punjab, the place of butter naan, butter chicken, tandoori ans what not and very well know the taste of these dishes but I will not recommend this place to anyone. The colours used in the food are in excess, I washed my hands like 4-5 times with soap but no luck. They are so bad that I have these colours marked on my fingers. They have used excessive spices which are not required at all and this is when I ordered mild spices , I am wondering what would have been a result if I asked for spicy. The price is also very expensive, restaurants in downtown and other parts of ottawa are serving much better quality at a lesser price.

Apologies for the most honest review, but this is my feedback, May be they can improve and serve much better next time to other customers walking in or...