Kuya J - SM City Cebu — Restaurant in Cebu City

Walked in, stood by the door for a while. No one paid attention. There were no clean tables but there were a couple of empty ones, so I stood by one. In 10 minutes, still no one had acknowledged me or offered to clean a table for me. Yet there were at least 6 people working the tables overall.

It’s just that they were so incompetent it took 2 or 3 of them just to get water onto a table. From what I could tell anyway.

UPDATE 19 Feb 23: Tried them again. They were out of both of our first choices for a meal; but with some effort, we got as far as getting food on the table. We had to ask multiple times to get our drink orders, and for the bill.

Again, there were loads more people working there than there needed to be, yet the service was slow and inattentive. Servers were either standing around chatting or they were doing busy work, like sorting spoons, when there were tables that needed clearing and customers that needed attention. There were literally 3 people in their restaurant uniforms sleeping at tables outside.

I give them this suggestion: after the customer places an order, bring the drinks right away or put service water on the table. It reassures the customer that the order is understood and in the queue. If you are bringing little side-snacks like peanuts, bring those out right away also. Don't wait for the main courses to be finished. It's all in service to making the customer feel like you're...

Disappointing and felt short changed.

Staff were polite but sad to say, that was the best of my experience with Kuya J in Ayala Cebu.

I ordered the grilled chicken and grilled tuna.

The meal took almost 45 Mins to arrive. I even saw that other tables of people that had arrived after me were getting their orders ahead of me. It didn't seem to me that the service crews had an efficient system going.

When the dishes did finally arrive, both were dry, lacked any tenderness and frankly, the dishes were bland. It was only the soy/chili sauce that saved the tuna. Alas, nothing could save the 5 chicken pieces! The grilled chicken was made up of 2/3 of bones...almost no meat!

Yes, Kuya J is cheaper than other Filipino outlets such as Gerry's Grill but at least at GG, I felt like I was at least getting value for money given their portion sizes.

What did send me over the top though was that everything was served in chipped crockery. I have never ever been in a restaurant where food is served on chipped or broken plateware. I've never even seen that at street markets or food stalls.

Absolutely won't be back to this restaurant or any of their other...

Weak customer service. I requested a glass of water, and they acknowledged it but didn’t serve it. I followed up, and again, they simply acknowledged it but still didn’t bring the glass. On my third follow-up, they finally said they didn’t have a glass available—what kind of answer is that? If that was the case, they should have told me the first time. How can a restaurant not have a spare glass? My colleague ended up using the sinigang bowl just to drink the juice—how unacceptable is that!

To make things worse, after we had nearly finished eating, a staff member approached to ask if we still didn’t have a glass. When I said yes, they finally provided one, but by then it was too late—my colleague had already used the bowl.

Additionally, the juice they served had little to no ice. Very disappointing...