Denny's — Restaurant in Conway

Too chaotic to be functional. Had to wait to be seated despite a half empty restaurant. Food came out cold after waiting over a hour, there were only 3 people in my party. Details below.

First, the restaurant had less than half the tables with seated guests, so they weren’t full or super busy at all. When we walked in there were two other groups of two waiting that had arrived before us. I waited at the host/cashiers counter to be helped and observed one booth being cleaned, observed a bunch of employees behind the bar (too many to be functional without getting in each others way and having to step over and around each other like lemmings, which is what they were doing); one saw me and kept a doing what she was doing, and then kept finding other things to do until a couple (that got from another booth) came up to pay for their meal. She then finally approached the host stand and told the couple wanting to pay to wait while she asked how she could help me. I told her that we needed a table, and pointed out the two other small parties that arrived before me. She asked me to wait and cashed them out. Then she got menus to try to seat people; we all told her which people were there first; two ladies were waiting for a booth to be available and I had observed the one being cleaned and the other that was just vacated. Rather than seating them despite them having arrived first and booths being available, which they had already communicated before we got there but the message wasn’t passed on and they were made to wait, the hostess sat the other couple first. She came back to seat the two ladies and sat them at a completely different booth than the two I observed, so basically they were made to wait for no reason because there was already a booth available. My party of 3 is finally seated but someone approached the hostess seating us and in a confrontational tone and manner asked her, “why didn’t you seat them up there, why are you seating them back here?” She calmly explained that it was this sections turn? Not sure but she did a good job staying calm and not being offended despite the manner in which she was approached. We are seated near the two ladies I mentioned at the beginning that had been waiting a while; another couple is sat in our same section about 5 min after us or so. We place our orders, (my daughter wanted the strawberry banana pancakes but they’re out of fruit?? On a Saturday.) and wait. And wait. And wait. The couple, seated after us and the other ladies, is brought food before any of us even though they were seated last. I could see the other ladies were frustrated as well. We were there for at least an hour and 15 minutes before our food arrived, and my food was COLD. The server asked if everything was okay and I told her the food was cold. She offered to remake it and I absolutely did not want to wait another hour for more cold food. I declined and ate my cold food. I was so hungry and frustrated I didn’t even notice they never brought my extra sausage links I ordered. I just wanted to eat and get out of there. My server was waiting tables at each far end of the restaurant…that’s too much for anyone to handle. Sections are called sections for a reason and you don’t assign one server two sections across the restaurant from each other. You don’t train brand new cooks on your busiest shifts (not that it was really that busy but I believe it was relative to that restaurant, and weekends are busier in general), you don’t have the hosts off doing and PRIORITIZING other menial tasks not at the host stand over seating guests, and why does there need to be six people stepping over and around and on top of each other behind the breakfast bar to begin with? Go back to the basics because it’s clear you don’t even have those figured out yet. Also, yelling at your employees about where they’re seating people in front of the guests they are seating and everyone else leaves a bad impression and is a good way to lose employees and remain short...

This place needs an INTERVENTION!. Terrible experience, the worst I've had in a restaurant in years. I think that the cook staff were actually doing a decent job, but management and front staff negated anything that the cooks were doing. Just a few of the problems encountered: -Had to ask waitress if she could wipe off seats of booth she directed us to because of food, paper and liquid on them.

-Inattentive waitress (Ashley).

-Coffee was room temperature and waited at least 10 minutes for a warm up, and that was after reminding Ashley. She said that she was sorry about that.

-Extremely long wait for food and then biscuits and gravy come out first at slightly above room temperature because they had sat in servers area for a long time while the Wait Staff tried to figure out where the orders went. They appeared to be in a complete state of confusion. At one point, there were probably twelve plates waiting for the Wait Staff to take to tables and they were there for a long time.

-The rest of the three breakfast orders come out about five minutes later and one of the three orders is wrong.

-They weren't even that busy and the young girl (Calesa?) tells arriving customers that they are full. A quick glance showed that they were not even close to full, but had at least four empty tables in our immediate area that were still covered in dishes from previous customers. These tables weren't touched at all during our visit.

-Lots of observable tension, confusion, and conflict between employees and no one moving with a sense of urgency, direction or purpose.

-The 'lady' who appeared to be the shift leader grabbed her purse and headed for the door at a trot while saying "I've got to get out of here!". I was thinking the same thing by this point.

-A female member of our party went to the restroom and came back to report that it was filthy and the trash receptacle was overflowing.

-When I go to check out, I have to wait a long time while they're drawing straws to see who loses and has to go to the register. Well, it was (Calesa?) again. When she was tasked to go to the register, she was standing at the servers' window from the kitchen eating what appeared to be some kind of a sandwich on toast directly above the plates of food that were to be taken out to customers. UNBELIEVABLE! She came to the register, chewing, with her mouth still full of whatever she was eating and rang me out. And, of course, she rang the ticket up wrong. I didn't bring up the mistake as I couldn't take anymore of this clown show. I followed suit of the shift leader saying "I've got to get...

I generally come here due to social anxiety mixed with a lot of food restrictions for health reasons, and they're rarely as busy as other places. So I normally don't have to worry about it being super loud or crowded even when other places around it are. It's clean and can be a quiet little place to go. Its Dennys so I'm not eating a super healthy meal or anything, but some of the staff are super understanding and accommodating to the couple of changes I have to make to certain dishes. Today was the worst experience. Our waitress was way more concerned with sitting and talking both to the dishwasher and someone on her phone. She never offered refills, the person I was with asked if he was supposed to get marinara sauce with his mozzarella sticks and she said they didn't have any stocked so it was frozen. I give leeway on that as things sometimes happen. But she tried to tell me she didn't know if she could make the dish without mushrooms and when I said they do it every time I'm in here she said "Well different cook I don't know if she will but I guess I will try". You could tell by her attitude she just didn't want to deal with it. I always apologize ahead of time for having restrictions but they aren't super hard to accommodate to be completely honest. Outside of a bad waitress this evening I don't have anything bad to say about this establishment. I've had mostly decent experiences. I don't think it would have bugged me so much if I could tell she was having a rough day or something but she was a lot more professional with other customers which made it seem like she was that way due to me "being difficult". I really can't help that I eat at home 98% of the time and want to treat myself once in a while. I'm always super nice about it and apologetic because I have been in the service industry I know what it is like. It should not be an excuse to treat a customer like they're a problem or less important than other customers...