IHOP — Restaurant in Braintree

This was my first and last dining experience at this location. After many bad meals at the Quincy IHOP, I was eager to give Braintree a try and see if it would be any better. After all, I was impressed by the Cambridge location, so maybe it would be good? Nope. I was wrong. The first issue I had was the wait. The host told us we'd only have a 20 minute wait but we ended up waiting more than 30 mins before we were seated. I chalk this up to the short staffing and lack of available seating, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, they didn't have much to work with. There were only about 3 or 4 servers running the whole dining room and presumably a single chef making all the food, so a bit of a wait is understandable and even expected. After we were seated, it took quite some time for our orders to be taken. By the time we placed our orders, we'd been at the restaurant for about an hour and we were starting to lose our appetites. The atmosphere in the dining room is contemporary as this is a newer location, but it feels a little cramped. I felt like all of the other patrons were watching me eat and it was hard not to make awkward eye contact across the dining room or overhear parts of conversations (Though, maybe the people were just loud.) The food took about a half hour and by the time it arrived, 2 out of 3 meals were cold, my hash browns were underdone and my father's chocolate chip pancakes had very few chips to speak of. My omelet came out piping hot though, so that was a plus, but the taste was only okay. I finshed about half. It took another 10 or 15 minutes to get the bill, as we had to ask the manager to even recieve it as the servers were too preoccupied. So, by the time we left it was about 2 hours after we arrived. And all of us left with a case of indigestion. The food didn't sit well, nor did the experience. I take...

Beware of Doordash. My experience today leaves me wondering if they are deliberately charging customers more than the standard 7% tax. Today i ordered from this IHOP via Doordash. To be fair, this IHOP's food was great, it was well prepraed and it was fantastic. Now this brings me to Doordash. I received two receipts which reflected tax variances. One was included in my delivered order, this one showed $0.79 tax. The other was emailed to me, that one had a tax of $0.94. Why were there two different figures? I had to do some math to figure out which tax was correct.

My subtotal was $11.35, my tax was $0.79 equaling a total of $12.14. I used a formula, (subtotal)+(subtotal×standard tax)=total. So here we go, ($11.35)+(11.35×0.07)=$12.1445 which is rounded down to $12.14. It shows that $0.79 was actually what I should've been charged. IHOP was honest, Doordash was not. $0.94 tax is about 8.3% of my subtotal. This is about 1.3% greater than the standard tax.

I called Doordash and explained my dilemma and I was refunded an amount to make up for the variance. Always do your due diligence. Imagine if this has been an ongoing thing. Does this mean that Doordash has always been charging consumers more tax?

MY ADVICE!:

ALWAYS, type into your orders instruction section: "Include the order's receipt in my order's bag." That way you can compare the restaurants totals with Doordashs'...

Great service but be aware of using the pay by app option available at this and all Ihops for that matter. It does not present you with an option regarding tip payment. It automatically elects to include tip whether or not you intend to include, no matter how much or how little, including a tip of a measly 18%, so it's not even standard amount, so your server will not only not receive their tip in cash as a tip should only be paid standard, but it'll underpay them as well. Pay your bill debit card at the table. Note that when you include their tip on your debit payment they're most likely then required to report those tips as income which is highly unfair considering it's a tip not their standard wage. I did report this issue to Ihop's corporate office and they did say they were unaware of this issue and told me there should be an option where I can elect whether or not to include a tip as well as three different options as to how much of a percentage of tip to include if so, 18%, 20% & 22%, but I made it clear to them that this was not the case. I also told them we would be coming again and I would double check that and with an additional person and our waitress by my side as witness the second time, we confirmed that this option was not there. It may only happen to some and not everyone, but for the sake of your server, you'd be better off avoiding this kind of payment...