Hope Cafe El Centro — Restaurant in El Centro

I’m a long time customer of Hope Cafe since their Calexico location, but their El Centro location has been declining in service for the past year. Many times we’ve been told we can’t order certain items on the menu, or we’re limited to “2” items so the restaurant can save their products for other customers, kitchen closing early, and many more “reasons” (read: excuses) why they aren’t a well-running business. Half the time, the restaurant is short staffed and they run out of food early. It’s not the employees fault if management isn’t staffing or ordering enough food for their restaurant. This is poor management and planning. What is the employees fault is saying you’re open and we can order, then making someone wait 10 days minutes to order food, then saying they can only order drinks. All around, poor planning on managements part, poor communication from the employees, and poor service from the staff. The quality of service has been severely lacking and it is disappointing since this is one of our favorite places to go. I don’t normally leave reviews, but it’s been too many times now that I have had an unsatisfactory and...

This is the classic "aesthetics over quality" place. Cute little place, but horrible customer service and mediocre food. My salad took so long that I thought the staff was collecting the vegetables in the fields. Overall, my order took an hour to get and one second to know that the wait was not worth it. The only highlight of my experience was the one staff that kept apologizing for the service. I didn't get your name in the chaos, but thank you, long black hair lady, for being kind to my coworkers and me. To the other coworker that slammed the door on us and was apparently one hair away from cussing at us for trying to pay/get our food after an hour of waiting, try to be kinder. We understand that it's rush hours and you might be under staff, but there was no need to act so ill-manner. Overall, okayish overprice food, staff not prepared to work during rush lunch hour, and unable to accommodate...

I was looking forward to trying the food/drinks since I knew the calexico one had good reviews, so I gave this location a chance. The drinks were good. The food however was questionable. They substituted certain ingredients without informing us and also were missing a lot of ingredients in general. The crepe I had was pretty terrible because the topping was replaced with something else without my knowledge and the flavors did not mix. The customer service was also not that great but I think they recently opened, so I hope it will improve. I think they should cut down on the food items and keep a very small, solid list of their most popular items that they know for a fact they can have ingredients for and that will actually taste good. This place has the right look and aesthetic that people enjoy and deem “insta-worthy”, but I just don’t think it’s worth it if the...