Panera Bread — Restaurant in Chester

Drove thru last night. Spent $50 for 3 soups and sandwiches and a salad. Purchased the 'Classic Grilled Cheese' sandwich and Creamy Tomato soup. Soup very good, but the 'Grilled' Cheese'...horrible! I've been eating Grilled Cheese sandwiches for more than 50 years. This one is by far the worst! Many places make a Toasted Cheese Sandwich and call it a Grilled Cheese Sandwich. This definitely is NOT a Grilled Cheese Sandwich. Not sure it was even a toasted cheese sandwich. The bread may have been in the toaster just long enough to dry out. No sign it had really been toasted, certainly for sure not grilled. Thick, dry white bread. Inside a dry slab of indescribable yellow cheese approx 10% melted..just enough to curl a couple of corners a bit. Cheese rather tasteless. On a prior trip had the Mac n Cheese pretty good, however does not make up for The Worst 'Grilled' (?) Cheese Sandwich I ever ate, among a couple of thousand consumed in the past 50+ years. Actually at about a quarter of half the sandwich. The rest went into the garbage. I have been going to Panera before they were Panera. They were originally The St Louis Bread Company and absolutely fantastic. Lately, the food size and quality has sunk while prices in many cases are now ridiculous. In an economy with a huge overcapacity in places to eat and many store closings and bankruptcies Panera appears to be on this path. I'll be spending my money elsewhere...

Dirty dishes and General Manager Matt said “don’t worry about it” “we just need to soak them they are stained but they are sanitized”. OK I don’t care if it’s “sanitized” I don’t want to eat food off dishes that I can scrape the residue off with the spoon I’m eating with. The dish isn’t clean. Period. You shouldn’t be able to scrape anything from the dish your food is on. Look at my photo. You can clearly see where my soup ends and the dirty residue begins. And the GMs dismissive attitude was not acceptable either. After seeing at least two reviews claiming they got food poisoning here I’m not surprised.

Additionally they don’t heat/crisp the bacon in a BLT at this location which makes zero sense. I know it’s already cooked but it’s supposed to be served crisp with the fat rendered not refrigerated. Every other Panera location heats it. Not this one.

Major shame. I hope corporate reads this and does...

We placed our order. Young people in back preparing orders. They were laughing, carrying on throwing stuff at each other. Putting their hands to their mouths. Little young girl kept wiping her hands on her shirt. They forgot part of our order, bagel and cream cheese. My wife went up and asked the young people about the missing bagel & cream cheese. She went back up to the register to ask the woman who took our order but she was no where to be found. My wife went back to pickup counter but got no help. While she went back up again to register to find the woman who took our order. I then went up to pickup counter and looked in. I found the woman who took our order. She had her cellphone out showing something to 3 of the young. They were are just standing laughing. I hollered at them for our bagel & cream cheese. Young people went back to work and woman and got our bagel and...