Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen — Restaurant in Columbia

I have quite a busy life, so there is always not enough time for me to eat. For this reason, I prefer fast food places. I like when I don’t need to wait for my order for 20-30 minutes. Apart from this, burgers, pizzas and other similar things are very tasty. Yet, there is one more place that I like even more than any fast food restaurants – it is the restaurant called Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen. I like to visit this place and spend time with my close friends. The atmosphere inside is great. There are a great number of small tables and cozy chairs and sofas. It is very comfortable to sit on them with a small company of people. Yet, it is also possible to come here with a big company and celebrate some special event, like anniversary or engagement. The light here is pleasant. The only minus in this place is the great number of people every day. However, the atmosphere is not the only thing that I like in this restaurant. I also like the service. The waiters and waitresses are very nice and do everything possible to satisfy their clients. A couple of times, I wasn’t satisfied that my order was not warm or isn’t ready for a too long period of time. However, my waitress patiently explained to me the situation and promptly rectified any mistakes. The most important element of any restaurant is its food. This is the reason why I adore this place. I really like to experiment and prefer to order different dishes all the time. As for me, all of the dishes are very delicious. Apart from this, I always order some dessert. This restaurant has a great variety of the desserts. My favorite is Apple Crisp Alamode and the Coconut Mini Cake. Both are very delicious. To have a dinner in this place isn’t very expensive. In general, most of the dishes cost from 10 to 30 dollars. Therefore, this restaurant is good for those, who don’t have much money but want to visit a special place. In general, I’m very happy that there is such a great place where I can spend a great time with my family and friends. It is very peaceful when there are not many people inside. In any case, I will carry on visiting this restaurant because I like the comfortable atmosphere, friendly waiters, affordable prices, and excellent dishes. If I need to recommend someone a place where to eat well in Columbia, it will be the restaurant Cheddar's...

I don't think I've ever written a review but our experience at this Cheddar's was so negative I felt obligated to do so.

Our group of four arrived on a Friday evening after work and it was pretty busy, as expected. It took us 45 minutes to be seated, which was again not great but roughly expected. Once we got seated, it was over 15 minutes until anybody even came by our table to greet us or provide water. Our server was clearly either new or still in training and severely struggled to take our orders correctly. She seemed overwhelmed and had no support from other staff. As annoying as it was I felt kind of bad for her. Another table that sat down roughly 30 minutes after we arrived were served their food before us. After 40 minutes of waiting for our food, we flagged her down and asked if she knew how much longer it would be. She almost froze, it took her a good 20 seconds to come up with an answer, and when she did said they were understaffed in the kitchen. Then she immediately asked me what I had ordered again, just to be sure. We watched as she directly left this conversation to go put our order in, 45 minutes AFTER we thought we already ordered.

We asked to speak to the manager and they said there was a crime in the parking lot they were currently more concerned with, and that they were understaffed in the kitchen which is why everything was taking so long. When I finally got my food, it was missing main parts of the meal (I ordered a chicken and rice dish with a side of broccoli cheddar casserole- they apparently were out of rice and broccoli cheddar casserole, but did not communicate that when I ordered. So, I was basically left with plain chicken. It was awful.) We ended up having our drinks comped but that was it. We left almost 3 hours after arrival, the food was terrible, service was terrible. Unfortunately none of us will...

Used to come to this place semi-regularly, but stopped for a while due to the servers seeming overworked by the amount of time it takes to have anyone actually come by (last time I came before this most recent time, we were forgotten about for about 40 minutes after being seated). They have a really good Monte Cristo, so I can forgive it happening on occasion. We decided to come by on Easter, figuring it would be busy, but not being too concerned with it taking a while to be seated. It was actually not that busy, which was nice, but initial ordering took a bit longer than expected compared to similar establishments. Luckily, we were able to order everything at once since we had enough time to figure out what we wanted in totality, and then several minutes more, before we were asked about what we wanted to drink. Unfortunately, none of that mattered, as we were seated next to a very loudly fussing child... which somewhat quickly turned to two screaming children just slightly after our food came out. Probably one of the worst experiences I've had, seeing as how my whole purpose of coming to a restaurant to eat was defeated by my complete lack of appetite due to a massive headache caused by a toddler screaming directly at me (literally being faced in my direction by an idiotic parent who didn't want the child screaming in their face) literally 3 feet from the edge of my table. My two cents are don't give parties a smaller waiting time in the lobby just to make them wait an inordinately long time to even get a drink order in (something I've, once again, had happen here repeatedly) and maybe have some situational awareness as to where you may be seating parties, like filling one of the many empty tables (not in that servers preordained section) that are not close to small children already fussing and...