Filippi's Pizza Grotto Jamul — Restaurant in California

Unfortunate that this restaurant has such poor customer service.

We came here at 7 pm on a Monday night and there was only one other family eating at the time and we ordered two pizzas to go. They told us that the pizzas would be ready to go in 30 minutes we paid for our pizza and headed back to our car to wait. After about 15 minutes we decided after speaking with our family that we would like to eat in looking for a more traditional dinner experience.

We walked in the restaurant and explained to the "hostess" Mallory that we were going to be eating inside. She cut us off mid sentence and wanted to know how many needed to be seated. Ok I understand that this can be a bit confusing for someone with little experience and probably caught the girl off guard so we brushed that off and decided to sit down and wait for our food/ the rest of our family.

After waiting another 20 minutes, we began to wondering where our food was (that we had then waited 40 minutes for) and decided to ask for some of the bread for the table that we had seen the other diners enjoying.

This lead to Mallory telling us that bread was going to cost us “another 4 dollars”. Which seemed strange to me considering that every other time I had eaten here I had no idea that I was paying more for “complementary bread”.

Twenty more minutes later (a full hour after we ordered our pizza) our “waitress” (who we only had spoken with when asking for and and delivering our drinks) brought us our pizza which was clearly burnt (probably since it had been cooking for an hour). It was at this point that we decided something with this whole experience was seriously wrong.

We decided that we should be getting in touch with somebody in a managerial position to give them some insight into the experience we were having with his selected staff. After asking our waitress to speak with a manager, she promptly returned and told us that he had “stepped out” and would be with us shortly. We decided to wait since we felt this feedback was important.

Shortly after that the waitress returned with our money and informed us that the pizzas were on the house and slammed our money on the table (no apologies, no asking for our feedback, no opportunity to express our experience).

We figured we should double-check that the manager was on the way (he wasn't). After the manager (or the person who was claiming to be) finally appeared, this entire situation ended with the manager telling us that our feedback didn't mean anything to him or his business practices. He ended the conversation with “frankly I won't ever see you people again” and he was right, me and my family will never return to this pizza shop.

By and away the worst treatment I have ever gotten at a restaurant in my life. I didn't want my food for free, I just wanted to be heard.

Please, if you are hoping for a family style dinner experience, go...

Lunch on a Friday for two, dining in, sharing a large Veggie Pizza, one soda, one water, tax, tip = $50. At 12:30 p.m. the parking lot was empty and we were seated in a large central room with nobody else. We could hear a couple other customer voices perhaps in a different room. We ordered a $31.50 large veggie pizza and one $4.00 soft drink. The pizza came relatively fast, and it must have had 10 pounds of cheese on top. Normally I suppose some folks like that, but I was missing sauce. Sauce makes or breaks an Italian restaurant, and honestly, having eaten two pieces, I don't remember seeing or tasting any sauce. Not to say it wasn't there, but everything on the pizza was overpowered by the loads of cheese. A 2-generation family of four adults came in and sat next to us. The single overhead TV playing the Padres game was our entertainment. There was one server, tending to what wound up being 4-5 groups throughout the building, and she was spread very thin, so the refill of my water took an eternity. The silverware is the cheapest, flimsiest, lightweight, bendable bulk silverware they could find on earth, and the "knife" is really a butter knife that my friend (an old senior) could not cut his pizza with. The overall decor I guess is what defines this restaurant chain (old wine bottles hanging from the ceiling and fake vine leaves adorning the home depot wood grid walls that separate the spaces) but the fake leaves and empty bottles are dusty dirty has-beens, and frankly, gaudy. If this is Italy, I don't want to go overseas. It's what you see on a restaurant nightmare kind of show where they come in and rip it all out to make it modern. But we didn't come for romantic decor. And we didn't come for the soda. We came for the pizza! Fortunately, there was enough leftovers to feed two teens that night, so that's the light at the end of this pseudo-Italian train tunnel. If I was to go back to this restaurant, I would order the pizza TO GO, and skip the $4 soda as well as the $11.75 tip (31%) for an overall mediocre...

The place was empty at 5pm on a Sunday night which was great. We had no wait to be seated and our server took our order right away. After that tho the visit completely sucked. We waited 45 minutes for a small pizza. While we waited our server never even checked up on us. After the server finally brought us the food he completely just disappeared again. We are, finished and wanted to pay and leave and he was nowhere to be found. Some other server actually came over to talk to us and when we told him he went to try and get our server. In our part of the restaurant there was 2 female servers and 3-4 male servers. The 2 females did a great job with their tables and were very consistent with their customers. The male workers on the other hand were laughing and joking about getting fired and how they cleaned the tables (which they pick up the stuff, wipe the table down once with a rag and they're done. Eww) and you could tell they really didn't want to be there. At the end I wanted to complain to the one in charge but the whole night I couldn't find a single thing that said the servers name on it so I didn't even know who to complain about. I actually went to this particular location because I was told it was still family owned but after that I will not be going back nor recommending...