AllStar Wings and Ribs Richmond Hill — Restaurant in Richmond Hill

This place used to be the best sports bar in the area with good food and service. However, with the pandemic, I hadn't been to this restaurant in a while. I recently visited, expecting the same good experience that is usually present, but that was not what happened.

As soon as you walk into the restaurant, you see that the servers are frantic and rushing around to serve everyone. The problem with this is that there are only 3 servers to serve both the patio and inside, and one of the servers was behind the bar, making more like 2 servers. It seems like there are not enough servers, however they were good despite the lack of them. I went with two other people and we had ordered one of the burgers and I had ordered pemeal bacon sandwich. We were immediately told by the waitress that they were out of burgers, which is fine, I'm sure that this happened sometimes before the pandemic. However, when my friend ordered a steak instead of the burger, the waitress left to check with the kitchen, and came back a few minutes later saying they only had 14oz steaks left, so he had just ordered wings.

So everything was fine and the order was put in. However, the waitress had come back 10 minutes later to let me know that the kitchen was not making sandwiches or burgers. I was thinking about just not eating entirely at this point, but ordered the chicken tenders instead. I substituted the fries with a salad and was told there was a $2.00 surcharge to sub with a salad. this was dissapointing, as I would assume that the very small side salad they give you would be cheaper than the 1lb of fries, but I guess this was always the case.

While waiting for the food to arrive, my friends and I had noticed that the string lights they had set up (which looked kind of haphazardly strapped to the ceiling) were constantly dimming and brightening, and at some points were full on strobing, which was annoying. This could legitimately be a concern for someone who gets disoriented/naseous from flickering lights, or even worse a person who is photoepileptic. However, once we had got the food, it was good and served fairly quickly. I am going to assume that the lack of food items was due to the management just straight up not stocking it, rather than them being sold out. I understand that the main attraction here is the wings, but if certain groups of food are not being made by the kitchen it should be indicated on the menu that you can not order these items.

tl;dr: Place is understaffed, and either the management or the owners are trying to cut corners by not stocking certain food and not indicating on the menu, which makes ordering frustrating. the lights in the place are constantly flickering and varying in brightness. I do not blame the employees for this bad experience as they were doing the best they could with the limited people working. The management/owners really need to step up their game if they want this...

If this place could get negative stars I would gift that to them. I have never walked into an all star establishment and it be this empty before; I now understand why. I have been to numerous All Star locations across the GTA and never have I been so disgusted and disappointed in an establishment.

Firstly, the outside temperature was 4 degrees, inside the restaurant was probably about the same. As someone who partakes in outdoor winter sports, I am rarely cold. I have never had to wear my jacket to eat dinner before from how frigid it was. When asking for the heat to be turned on, we were told it was on, however, I did not hear the furnace kick in & no warm air, rather cold air was coming out of the vents. Even the waitress complained it was cold.

Secondly, when reading the menu, you can expect a romaine Cesar salad. What I received was iceberg lettuce mixed into romaine lettuce. No one informed us ahead of time that they did not have romaine lettuce. When bringing the size of the portion to the waitresses attention that it was embarrassing how little was given for a “large” portion, she said she also thought it was going to be more but refused to bring it back to the kitchen to add more lettuce. The large typically feeds 2 people, however, the 1.5 handfuls of mixed lettuce was not enough to share between two people. My mother in law ate a garden salad that was made of iceberg lettuce and 1 slice of a tomato that was cut in half. When speaking to the manager to complain about how disappointed we were, she apologized for the salad and brought us another salad and said iceberg wasn’t delivered from their vender. Do I think the order didn’t come like they said? No. I believe they were too cheap to order romaine.

Thirdly, I have never been so appalled by the size of wings in my life. I ordered bone in wings and they were as small as a McDonald’s chicken nuggets. I was able to take 1 bite of the wing and all the meat came off the wing. When requesting to have all flats in the wings, we were told it wasn’t possible to make that request, meanwhile at other locations it isn’t an unreasonable request, in fact, have been asked my preference. The “carrots” that came with the wings were in fact shreds of carrots. They were so thin they were transparent.

Lastly, the manager was extremely rude. When bringing up multiple things that were wrong (the aforementioned items), she initially started by apologizing, which later turned into being defensive and giving us attitude as if our concerns were irrelevant. I’ve never been faced in the service industry with such awful customer service.

We later went to neighbouring Duff’s to get real wings. Theirs were triple the size and actually received what we ordered. Don’t waste your money at All Stars. They’re cutting corners in the wrong areas and are ruining their reputation. I will now bring my business elsewhere due to this disgusting service...

Please read as this could save you money and a headache.

This isn't the type of place where one can expect overly attentive service. You as a patron on the other hand should be fairly attentive as my party of 5 got charged an automatic gratuity despite the written menu and online menu stating it was only applied to a minimum of 6. It was particularly interesting seeing the server (who barely checked on us in the 4 hours we were there) trying to gaslight us into believing that it was for a minimum of 5 everywhere. (It's not, I have been in the industry for many years). The most egregious thing however was not the charging of gratuity, but rather not telling us at all. I only noticed after a couple of friends had paid a tip ON TOP of the applied grat. This coupled with the servers/managers insistence on not wearing a mask (yes, she was going from table to table at times without any sort of face covering at all) stained my experience to the point I will never be returning to this location. A suggestion: instead of arguing with guests about written policy, I suggest merely owning up to a mistake or oversight and just rectifying the problem.

The only reason it's not a 1 star review is because for all the years I've been coming here the wings have been solid. Considering the service though, I would recommend going to any of the myriad other wing places in town, or even going to other all star locations. It's a shame, I've been going here since I was in highschool. Shame shame.

Sincerely, a disappointed industry worker and long time patron

Edit: Reading the reply from ownership to my review amused me greatly. Instead of being a customer service focused company, they would rather spend their time arguing with me online. Just as the server did.

PS- Nobody had circled anything (it wasn't even the server billing us) and nobody verbally communicated anything. The fact that this franchisee completely glossed over the fact they wrongfully applied auto grat to a party of 5 was particularly entertaining ;) If this is your policy going forward please make sure to reprint the menus and get head office to change the wording on the...