TRU — Restaurant in Chapel Hill

Great central location. Historic, charming building. Lovely atmosphere. Comfortable and varied seating. Bartender, Nicco, is warm, intelligent, and engaging. Food is high quality and reasonably priced, but the menu is quite limited.

Ordering is weird. What if my phone is dead? Maybe the bartender should have an iPad to help the fumbling boomers who want a glass of wine. Would gladly pay a little more to speak my order to the lovely Nicco. Would also like to have the option to leave a "custom tip" over $3. Even a slip of paper where the guest checks off ingredients they want on the sandwich (like you order rolls at the sushi bar) would be better. Or, consider this amazing innovation: guests could pay in American dollars, which would entail no credit card fees to anyone!

Why does my food come to me in a paper sack like they want me to leave, even after I told their computer that I was "dine-in"? Saw lots of students studying and heard some of them try to order coffee...but they don't have coffee.

Also, this is a wine bar, why can't I order a charcuterie? They have all the elements on the sandwich menu, so it wouldn't even be a stretch. Is it because they don't have plates and it doesn't fit nicely into a paper bag?

This place has so much wonderful potential to be a comfy hangout for adults who want to relax with a glass of pinot after work or meet a colleague during the day outside of the office. You know, the kind of people with a credit card who live in Chapel Hill all year round. The online only ordering feels alienating to this demographic. It's a bar. Let me lay down a card and open a tab and treat my friends. Let me pore over an actual printed menu with my girlfriend. Instead, I must suspend human connection while I fondle an app on my phone. Again.

I'm starting to wonder if management is a low IQ AI that has only read about what a cozy wine bar is like, but isn't capable of going to one because they are plugged into the wall, controlling the wrong things. The AI is hallucinating about the kind of business this is. A glass of wine is a luxury, a treat, a discretionary expenditure. The clientele is not in a big hurry or avoiding speaking to people. And they will gladly pay 3% more so you can get an actual POS system and they talk with the bartender about their order. The environs are all there, but the business model better suits a...

Went here for a recruitment event this past week. Decor and cleanliness seemed solid, though the lights in the area we had reserved were incredibly dim to the point of being difficult to make out the expressions of the people you were talking with.

I had heard some horror stories about how hard it was to order here because you have to order through a website you access through a QR code. Coworkers said they no longer went to TRU because of the website ordering system. Some people I was with struggled, and repeatedly took five literal minutes to figure out how to place an order, but I didn’t find the system terrible.

The wait times were atrocious though. I had ordered a couple of beers and noticed that they seemed to take quite a while. This wait time was particularly annoying because when ordering you (quite reasonably) have to put in your location so the server knows where to deliver your drink to. I ordered a beer while sitting in the couch area as I wanted a drink before mingling with people on the other side of the room. I then had to sit there on by the couches until my drink finally showed up so I could more freely move around wherever I wanted, which was a pain.

With my third beer (at a time when things weren’t particular busy) I started a timer as soon as I placed my order. The beer took 21 minutes and 17 seconds to arrive. After the server dashed off to the other side of the restaurant I took a sip and discovered I had been served a fruity cider rather than the simple lager I had ordered the better part of a half hour ago.

Seems like a fine place to get food with a friend (wait times wouldn’t be as big of a deal for that), but I will be advocating against my department holding any events here again. The clunky ordering system was just a horrible obstacle to getting decent service and actually mingling with people.

If management wants to fix things, they need to make it possible to order a beer by just going up to the bar and paying for it. Until that basic service in available, I wont be coming back, and I imagine the owner/manager will keep defending the website ordering system in their review replies even as more and more of my social circle avoids doing any business with TRU...

I really enjoy TRU. I went there for a business happy hour and have been back several times since then. The food and people that work there are great!

However, and this should come to no surprise if you have read other reviews, the ordering system is horrible. So horrible that when I first worked with it I thought I was being scammed. I'm pretty good with computers and I have struggled to operate it. Once I just gave up and walked out. It's slow, glitchy, and weirdly you sometimes get totally black screens. I see the owner has responded to several reviews about the system with the same response that due to costs they have gone to a "low-labor high-tech model". Low labor sure; high tech? This system looks like it was designed by a 12 year old in the late 90s. You also must use the system. I talked with one of the bartenders and they told me that the owner just simply doesn't care to change to another system or update the one they have now. That staff commonly have to deal with frustrated customers who can't get it to work. I've wanted to go to TRU more frequently (first dates, after work drinks), but have decided not to because the idea of fumbling on my phone for 15 minutes to order a beer isn't appealing. Also you can't start a tab, you have to use the system for each new order. A new POS might increase costs, but I would argue it would also increase revenue as people would simply be...