Vapiano — Restaurant in Mannheim

With all due respect to the people who work here, I find vapiano one of the worst places to eat and the only reason I had to go there one more time was because of an hungry child with no patient to find a better place. One characteristic of all vapiano establishments I have visited over the years in various locations (Frankfurt AM, Mannheim, Luxembourg, Berlin) - never my choice, always someone's else choice - is that the people who work at these establishments tend to be on the rude side. But this is not the worst part. Even the food, which is definitely not memorable, is not the worst part of vapiano. The two worst aspects of vapiano are the seating arrangement and the self service arrangement.

One has to queue for a long time at the various stations to order food which, in the case of the pasta or of the salads, will be assembled in front of you (one cannot really call it "cooking"). While you were waiting, it's possible that all seats have been taken taken. So now you have your food on the tray, and you have nowhere to seat. It's rather disconcerting that someone came up with this idea and that it even had some sort of success. Who wants to queue for a very long time for an assembled pasta dish? Why not just let people add an order to a queue (which could be even a simple and cheap piece of paper) and let them sit down and wait to be called when their dish is ready? The pizza stations use pagers - why can't they do the same for the pasta stations? Anyway, even after queuing 15 or 20 mins for a pasta dish and then maybe struggling to find a table, now that you have found a table, what awaits you is a bare wooden bench, no backrest, not a chair, because basically sitting comfortably to eat a 15 euros pasta dish is...

The food is amazing and the restaurant environment also. When you enter you receive a card and all your purchases will be registered on the card. You can enjoy to see how the cookers do your pasta or your salad. To go out you pay what is registers on that card. This system is adopted by the vapiano restaurants chain. The problem is when, in a Vapiano as central as this one in Mannheim, there are too many costumers for the size and the number of cookers/queues. Then you have to wait a lot. And if you order a pizza and someone else ordered a pizza and your pasta is ready afterwards or before the pizza. In this specific restaurant I would suggest to have more cookers/queues during the most visited days and hours. However, the price is very god for the quality of the food, so you have teh disadvantage of having to pick up your own good and try to plan when is the best timing to order it or go...

This rating is well deserved:

There's litter on the floor Tables are full of used dishes Cashier was involved in a long conversation with a college (just next to the dishes - they didn't care) Cashier seems unable to look into their customers eyes and gives an overall unwelcome feeling Staff members are sitting together with the customers (again: right next to dirty tables) Guest wanted to clean up their tables after themselves. It's impossible as there's no way to return the trays Complaints of another customer were just ignored Furniture is broken (like the drawers in the kitchen or door handles) Seating is uncomfortable Outer seating areas is located directly at the trash bins Menu items are unavailable on a regular basis. The sauce to the noodles was rather a soup and the dish...