Mellow Mushroom Downtown Denver — Restaurant in Denver

UPDATED 1/12/20 - Both Mellow Mushroom corporate and the general manager of this restaurant - Patrick - reached out to me. I was extremely floored at how seriously they took this issue and that they took the appropriate steps to rectify it. Patrick is a newer general manager at this particular location (roughly 2 months) and has clearly made some major improvements to service staff and attention to customer service since my previous visit. He invited us back after addressing many of our concerns and the experience was night and day different. Our server was prompt, courteous, and funny. Our food was absolutely delicious and it came out quickly. Clearly things have taken a turn for the better and Patrick and team have restored our faith in this Mellow Mushroom location. Thanks again team, great work!

It takes a lot for me to write a review this negative and my review history will indicate that I do not write negative reviews for the sake of writing negative reviews. I have to be pushed to my absolute breaking point to leave a 1-star review. I will also say that I have been to other Mellow Mushroom locations and had phenomenal experiences. This location was much different though. The only people in this restaurant who seemed to care about our situation was the hostesses who kept profusely apologizing, but could not seem to get our server or manager over to our table to explain the situation. Instead, it seemed that the server and manager were purposely avoiding us in order to avoid an awkward encounter. The hostesses did warn us when we arrived that pizza would take 40-45 minutes and we agreed that this was fine. We sat for nearly 10 minutes before we were even served. Because of bad past experiences with long wait times, we started a timer on our phone once our order was taken. Our drinks came quickly. At the 30 minutes mark, we still had no received our side salads even though many of the tables who had come in after us had already received cooked appetizers. We finally got up from our table and cornered our server who said he'd check. 5 minutes later we finally received our salads. At this point, our drinks were empty and they would never be refilled again the entire experience. At the 55 minute mark, we went to the hostess and asked to speak with a manager because our server wouldn't come to our table and we didn't know why we still hadn't received our pizza. We finally got our waiter's attention and he proved that he had submitted the order to the kitchen when we first arrived, but could give us no indication why we still hadn't received our order. We continued to wait with empty drinks and we were well past an hour. We never saw the manager until the 1 hour and 8 minute mark and only because we went and cornered her and begged her to let us leave because we felt we were being held hostage and still hadn't received our food and had empty drinks. She did say that we could leave and they would comp our bill, so we left with not having eaten pizza. This was really a bad experience that could have been made easily better with a server or manager who made even the slightest effort to just...

Went in on Friday night with a group of four. When I put my name in with the hostess, she wrote us in as #9 and said it would be about a 20-30 minute wait and they would call or text us. After waiting about 45 minutes, I went in to ask how much longer until our table was ready. Keep in mind, while we were waiting outside, the patio we requested to be seated on was empty. Only one table was seated. We stood there watching multiple tables get seated inside and outside so we were wondering why it was taking so long. When I went in and asked, the hostess looked at the sheet and when I looked at it, I saw that she was on the next page of reservations, in the teens, so I knew she skipped us. She then pulled the paper away and said the other hostess must have called me. I never received a call or a text the entire time we were waiting. When I told her that, she went to the other hostess and they pulled a table together on the patio and seated us.

Then our waitress Lexi took a long time to get to us. She brought out waters and told us we had to use the online menu on out phones. However the service was very spotty and we were all having trouble pulling it up. I asked for 1 paper menu for the 4 of us to share and was told by 2 different servers that they didn't have any available. However we watched multiple tables get paper menus and give them back to the same servers we asked for 1 from. Luckily i have a VPN on my phone so I was able to pull up the menu.

We then sat there waiting and waiting and waiting for our food. We watched people who had sat down after us get their food and drinks. We try not to complain as my friend and I have both worked in the service industry so we understand that Friday nights can be crazy. However earlier, i had heard the manager say to the hostess that the kitchen was running fine, it was the front of the house that was struggling. We also saw another male server on the patio, don't know his name but he was working very hard. Wish we had been put in his section.

Finally, my friend's wings come out. They're cold. Great. We get our pizzas, they were warm and tasted fine but we were starving considering at this point we had been waiting about 2 and a half hours to eat. We finish eating and we're waiting for Lexi to come back and bring a box and our checks. Don't see Lexi for who knows how long. Finally we flag down the other male server on the patio, I asked him for a box and he had it back to me in two seconds, good job to him. He also went to let Lexi know we wanted out check. When Lexi finally returned with our check, she put it down and said "Here's the check since I heard you guys were asking for it." We were a group of two couples so we wanted out checks separate so we had to ask her to split it, which she had an attitude about.

I don't know what was going on that night but that is one of the worst restaurant experiences I've ever had. I've been to this location before and the service was good, but I don't think I will be coming back. There are plenty of better pizza...

December 2023 update: When this happened in July, the General Manager Michael Post emailed me right away and apologized. He gave us a very generous credit to use for the next time we came to Denver. I called twice to see if the credit was showing in the logbook, where Michael said it would be, before we headed downtown. The first time they said they’d leave a message for Michael and he’d call me back in a few hours (he did not). The second time I called, I was out on “hold” (read-“ignore”) for :15 before I hung up - No one called me back. To say that this adds insult to injury is an understatement. How very disappointing.

July 2023: I hate to say it, but it's really gone downhill since we ate here last. This is our go to whenever we drive down from Boulder to events in Denver and we headed here after seeing Cirque du Soleil at Ball Arena at 3:30pm on a Sunday.

I went to wash my hands in the women's restroom and neither soap dispenser had soap and the paper dispenser wasn't working. Mind you two employees had just been in the restroom as well and not only did they not wash their hands (due to there not being any soap), they didn't go get soap refills either (!).

I found an employee at the hostess stand to tell that there was not any soap in the women's restroom and he said 'Okay, I'll let them know" (Let who know?). I said, that's nice, but I need to wash my hands. He didn't know where they kept the soap and had to find a manager. The manager handed him the soap and he went and replaced it.

We ordered with one server and then another server took over our table (odd - there were more servers than people). Requests were not transferred to our new server, however, so that was a pain.

We got an order of pretzel bites, a large specialty pizza, two beers, a soda, an ice tea, and a half size Avocado Hoagie with kettle chips.

The pretzel bites are not pretzels - they are balls of pizza dough with beer cheese (!?).

The specialty pizza was good, no problems there (lesson learned, stick with the pizza).

The beer was good and cold and only $4 each.

The hoagie was supposed to have seasoned avocado, onions, provolone, mayo, lettuce and roma tomatoes. There was 1/2 an avocado with salt on it, no onions, no provolone, no mayo on the side as requested, no lettuce and maybe 1/8 of a tomato. The 'kettle chips' were a bag of boulder kettle chips (!).

The kitchen was having a kerfuffle of some sort and since our previous server had recommended the (not) pretzel bites and the (not really made correctly) hoagie, we didn't feel like we could say anything to our new server.

We are huge MM fans and have been to MM in Savannah, Phoenix and Denver with no issues on service or satisfaction and it is a total bummer that our experience with our local spot was so bad yesterday.

I hope y'all can get some things worked out. I'd start with the bathroom...