First Watch — Restaurant in Austin

I have been a loyal First Watch customer for years, at one point going every single week for two years to the same location. I have never had an experience like the one I had today at this particular location.

We arrived, a party of two, and put ourselves on the list. We were told it would be 30-40 minutes. An hour goes by and we have watched about 15 parties get seated ahead of us. I go up and ask where we are on the list, and the hostess says we’re still three parties behind. She told me I had been misquoted the wait time and that they prioritize people who sign up online or on the app over those who sign up in person. She couldn’t give me an adjusted wait time but about 5-10 minutes later we were finally seated. We immediately ordered our full meals as soon as the waitress arrived.

50 minutes after that, our food finally arrived. There was a lipstick smear on my cousin’s glass (picture). Then her dish lacked chorizo and green onions, and mine lacked cheese. The waitress never apologized for the wait, but 5 minutes before we got the food she asked us if we wanted to order some toast and that our order was second up in the kitchen.

After all that, when we got in line to pay, it took over 15 minutes because the hostess was checking people in, checking people out, and handing out online orders. She avoided eye contact, never apologized for the wait, nor offered to make any changes to our tickets for the horrible service.

All in all we were there for 2 hours and 20 minutes, only 10 of which were spent eating our food.

As we waited in line to pay, one party overheard us talking about our experience and turned around to say that because of what we said they wouldn’t even bother putting their name down, and they left. Then a hostess told another party who was putting their name down that it wasn’t that busy and the morning had been pretty slow so it shouldn’t take long to seat them, which left us flabbergasted.

This place is obviously horribly mismanaged. We will never visit this...

I recently ordered food for my office from this location for 30-people. There are two managers at this location (Taylor and Cameron) who helped me throughout the process (I asked for everything buffet style). Both of them went above and beyond to execute the order.

This review is mainly about First Watch's online ordering system and their affiliation with DoorDash. I am hoping someone from the First Watch corporate will read this.

1. First Watch's online ordering does not allow more than 12 items per order. This makes ordering for a group extremely difficult. Unless the purpose is to avoid large group orders, this makes no sense. I had to place 5-separate orders to sum up everything I needed.

2. The delivery was done by DoorDash and our order was delivered by 3-separate drivers. This is probably because the ordering system considered the number of orders not realizing it was all going to ONE client and randomly selected drivers. But this also shows lack of human brain/touch as anyone reviewing these orders should have realized that this is for one client and the order should have gone to one QUALIFIED driver versus three. Every one of the drivers had different parts of the order making it super difficult. Two of them spoke zero English and one of these two got lost. 60% of the order arrived on time and the other 40% was late by 20 minutes. By the time the last 40% arrived, the first 60% was cold.

None of the drivers carried the food in proper insulated food bags which would have helped maintain the temperature of the food. One of the Dasher vehicles were beyond dirty. While I understand this is all Door Dash, my point is - First Watch's is a premium restaurant offering top quality food. They really should reconsider handing their food to companies like Door Dash that seem to not understand basic logistics of...

TLDR: First watch has no hospitality, the waitlist system is broken, and the store needs better staffing/management/planning.

After looking for a place to grab food on a Sunday lunch, I saw First Watch on google maps. Knowing that it would probably be busy I made sure to go online and jump on the waitlist there. The wait for 2 people said that it would be 20 - 30 mins. After arriving at the restaurant about 25 minutes later, I noticed that there was only 1 Host that was also the cashier. The servers don't close out their guests, which is ok, but it makes it to where there is a long line of people waiting to close out and waiting to talk to the host. I think they would have done well with another host, or a manager up front helping. After about another 15 mins in line to talk to the host, they let us know that it would be another 30-45 minutes of waiting. I let the host know that I checked in online and that we've already waited about 45 minutes and the host said "Yeah, that's just how the waitlist works". I then said "So we wait the time that it quotes online, and then have to wait double time?", the host agreed. There was no hospitality or empathy for the situation.

First watch uses a hosting software called Wisely that gives them proper wait-times and handles a lot of the workload. Its very clear that they haven't calibrated it the correct way and are not using it the right way.

We ended up leaving because I am not going to wait 2 hours for mediocre breakfast food. Went to Jim's instead and had amazing breakfast food, for a better price,...