Pizza Punks Belfast — Restaurant in Belfast

Horrific company, nothing short of a circus. If you’re ever offered a job here, for the love of God don’t take it. I’ve worked in the hospitality industry myself for 5 years and I’ve never seen such inept management.

My sister began working here 3 weeks ago. She’s 17 and this was her first job. She did 5 shifts before she was onboarded on to their system - in other words, she worked her first few shifts illegally all because management continually postponed taking her passport and national insurance number off her. She was also never given a contract to sign at any point. Slave labour + no contract = first red flags 🚩

For context, this place is a mess. Critically understaffed (for example, waiters can be seen doing bartender, kitchen porter and host duties because they literally have no one else to do them), no training provided to new starts, existing staff expected to work 60+ hour weeks to make up for it.

Due to the lack of staff and inefficient upper management, my sister wasn’t trained. She was thrown in and expected to know how to do everything. Given it’s her first job, it won’t be so easy for her in comparison to more experienced people. But irrespective of that, every new start in ANY job in the world needs training! Like what are yous doing?

Pizza Punks fired her tonight. Their reasoning? “We need staff that will take orders from tables”. That’s funny because she was never trained on how to do this? She’s worked here for 3 weeks and nobody in management told her nor taught her to take orders - instead she was told to clear tables, run food and drinks, help in the kitchen etc. basically like a support staff. Could they not have tried maybe training her first?

Please note they never previously expressed their concerns to her. They just pulled her into the office tonight and told her they were letting her go with immediate effect.

The funniest bit is, they told her, “It’s coming up to Christmas, we’ll get busier, we need people taking orders”. Ah yes, Christmas is approaching, you’re going to get busier, so your answer to that is to sack your staff? When you barely have staff as it is? The jokes write themselves. Never seen the likes of it. If they’d just trained her in the first place, or even begun training her now, she’d be all set!

I will be so surprised if this company lasts by continuing on like this. An increasing number of recent customers have reported excruciatingly long waits and poor service. You have management to...

I was hesitant to leave this review, but I think it's warranted. Probably the single worst service I've ever experienced in a restaurant.

Was ignored for what seemed like a long time on entering, then waited a very long time for a drink only to be served a lukewarm tin of pepsi with a straw in it. We were a table of 9 for my nieces birthday and spent a considerable amount of money, the food is meh, the starters are overpriced and disappointing, mac and cheese is bland and overcooked, the other starters we had were similarly poor.

The pizzas themselves were actually pretty decent, but in my opinion better pizza can be had at better prices elsewhere in Belfast.

The service - genuinely felt like we were somehow at fault for having the audacity to come in and spend money. We had left my nieces cake in the night before, but it was not taken out of the fridge until we asked for it at which point it was served fridge cold so it was near rock hard, they wouldnt let us cut it with a kitchen knife which is fair enough, but then didn't offer to take it to the kitchen and cut it for us, instead we hacked chunks off it with a table knife at the suggestion of the waiter.

Waiter didn't tell us his name or anything like that, the whole thing just felt impersonal and disappointing, which sucked because I had heard really good things about the place. Maybe the guy was just having a bad day, but I got the real feeling that he hated being there. It was extremely difficult to get the attention of waiting staff and the whole thing just felt very badly run, it wasn't clear to me that anyone was in charge. Several of us also were given dirty silverware.

I don't often leave negative reviews, in fact I think this might be my first, and this was our first meal out since the start of Covid, and we left very disappointed. The place was more than...

Firstly, the food here was amazing and the one drink we had was nice. The service however, was not great at all. Immediately we were met with hostility from the man (possibly the manager) who seated us as we weren’t aware it was crucial to mention the deal we wanted to use prior to ordering, he was rather rude and made us feel like burdens having not been to this restaurant before and not being aware this was usually how things were done. We are not from Belfast and usually deals are not mentioned until payment. Additionally, we overheard another member of staff mentioning the deal to another table as they were ordering the 6 items included in the deal so I think she was being helpful and letting them know by using this deal they could save money, not once was this mentioned to us despite us also ordering the same 6 items, hence why I made sure we could use it. Our food then arrived and it was lovely as I mentioned, not one fault in terms of food but again atleast 25 minutes passed by before anyone approached us again and by this point we were well finished our meals and our drinks had been empty since our food arrived, nobody asked if we would’ve liked another or checked everything was okay. We weren’t in a position to ask for another drink as the only person who wasn’t walking around with plates was the same man who was rude to us on entry. Eventually a friendly staff member came and took our plates and despite the fact we would’ve liked another drink we just left as we only have a couple more days in Belfast and wouldn’t want to stay somewhere we were made to feel uncomfortable. Not to mention but were charged a 10% service charge, usually I am not one to grumble this and if I knew it was all going to the chef I wouldn’t mind but as for the rest of the service, I am not happy about paying this as to be frank the service...