El Pollo Loco — Restaurant in Anaheim

UPDATED 2nd Review dropped to 2 Stars from 4--- Makes more sense reading 1st review BELOW & EZ to SPOT===== followed by 2nd review here---- I gave a fair review of my experience & 4 stars. EPL replied to my post [as you can see below] apologizing & asking for more details to be sent to them & they would do their best to fix. FIRST: Everything was explained in the review which led me to wonder why would you ask for more details? SECOND: What are you going to fix, it already happened. Their comment led me to believe they were considering a small compensation, I thought. THIRD: I sent my email to EPL feeling they wanted to smooth my experience. I was completely wrong. I received a reply from Jova at EPL with words of 'sorry you received service prompting your contact', 'thank you for bringing these matters to our attention, 'we regret any inconvenience or frustration', 'your patronage is important' and 'give us opportunities to serve you' as their compensation. Wow. They opened the door offering to ‘fix it’ then fall far short. I reminded EPL, in my return email, each location has multi-million-dollar revenue, likely making EPL a multi-billion-dollar corporation. After EPL’s reply, it appears they surely lack direct customer service. Possibly their rep Jova was concerned about EPL and the fear a tangible compensation, like a free burrito, may push EPL to the verge of bankruptcy.

FIRST REVIEW BEGINS HERE---- Although I have patronized this location previously, without incident, I visited on 7/30/21 on my way to the movies. The cashier was friendly, the order was served quickly & the food was tasty. I do have to say I was impressed with the guacamole sauce. Much thicker than the usual running green juice, found at many locations. When I attempted to use a $5 El Pollo credit the cashier seemed confused. When I asked how to apply the $5 from my phone he struggled; saying he wasn't sure and didn't have his scanner. Maybe it's me but, shouldn't the scanner be located AT the register and NOT on an employee? And, I would think a cashier would know how to apply cash credit. If he was just lazy or didn't want to bother, that's one issue. However, if he didn't know, I chalk this up to lack of training on the part of El Pollo Loco store management unless employees are required to attend a training session provided by El Pollo, Inc. prior to beginning work at one of their locations. Because of your employees lack of knowledge & proper training OR just lazy, I deducted 1 star . You should be aware that some people are fickled and only give one chance to store locations. In reading your reviews it appears a lot of people are displeased. Remember, if mistakes are made, it's easy to simply move on to another store OR another business that sells flame grilled chicken. There's lot's of competition out there. Kind of similar to pizza parlors. There's numerous places but Costco seems to capture the bulk of business with price, speed and taste. Although Costco does need to return the combo pizza or those people may move on to chicken at El Pollo, but only if EPL kicks...

I placed an online order thinking it would be the easiest and fastest way to grab my lunch before going back to work, but this was not the case at this location. First of all, the line of people waiting to place their order was to the front door, and the counter area where you pick up orders was crowded with angry customers. If it wasn't for the receipts in people's hands, I honestly wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between the lines. I tried for 10 minutes to get to the counter while customers who previously received their orders kept coming back because their orders were missing something. When I finally got to the counter, there was only one person in front of house who was filling and distributing orders slowly. She was trying to be accurate but was moving far too slow. She only spoke Spanish, so she had difficulty dealing with customers who only spoke English, myself being one of them. It wasn't until almost 10 minutes later (so 20 minutes total) when the long line of customers were gone that I was able to ask for my order from the cashier. Next, my simple double chicken avocado salad order was not ready as it should have been 20 minutes earlier, and I was told they only had thigh meat, which I do not eat. I finally asked them to cancel the order, and then, like magic, they had breast meat to place on the salad. The cashier tried to make it up to me by offering me a free drink, but I was far too frustrated at this point. After I got my salad, it was not double chicken at all, but rather a small amount. This took nearly my entire lunch break from work, and it shouldn't have. So, unfortunately, I will not be going back to this location any time soon. I hope they learn from this and get...

Horrible service, today my dad went to buy four pollo bowls, and they didn’t put chicken in any of the four pollo bowls, also they never have anything, no salsas, etc. He went back to tell them that they didn’t put chicken in the pollo bowls and they decided to give him one small cup of chicken. Supposedly they had only put chicken in two bowls, but none of them had chicken, and if they had put chicken in two bowls why didn’t they put chicken in the other two? just doesn’t make sense. We decided to go ourselves to get a refund, we had waste gas and our time, we brought the food back because we didn’t want it anymore it was cold and dry. The manager was very rude, wasn’t helpful at all, and he was also lazy. He asked for the receipt, we told him our situation that my dad was the one who bought the food, so he is the one that had the receipt, he just dropped the food off to us. All he did was walk out, he returned doing whatever he was doing, didn’t even say anything, and ignored us.Also they have all the orders in their system, but the manager didn’t even want to check. So I had to call my dad to bring the receipt, he had to come back all the way from his house to the pollo loco. The manager is bad at his job, he didn’t even apologize, nothing, he was being very rude, that manager needs to be fired, we did ended up getting a refund, but we had to go trough all of that. Horrible service don’t recommend coming to...