Vero Chicago Pizza — Restaurant in Four Corners States

As a small business owner and homeowner in the San Tan Valley/Queen Creek area, I try to support local small businesses. Especially right now, with this COVID-19 pandemic causing some businesses to close. We have eaten at Buddyz before and have always had good service. However, this visit was a bit different. My son graduated last night and chose Buddyz as his celebration meal. The graduation ceremony wasn't over until after 10 pm, so we saved it for Friday night (5/22/2020). The website says hours are 4pm to 8pm. I called at 4:30pm to confirm hours of operation and got a recording on the phone. I continued to call several more times throughout the day. Unsuccessfully, we could not get through. I thought ok, understandable, considering it's a weekend, maybe they're just busy. So, we took the drive out there and they were open (yay, good news). We went in and placed our order. We were told it would be ready in an hour and 10 minutes. Ok, no worries, I said we'll be back in an hour and a half as they had a packed house with patrons eating and having beverages,(with no masks, I'll explain why the mention later) as well as customers waiting outside for their pickup orders...fine by me. We left and ran a few errands and came back. Me and my son got down to pick up our food and we go in to check on the order and were told it wasn't ready and to wait outside. So, we did. We waited about 20 minutes and I went back inside to see how much longer because my car was running with other family members inside. Now, this is where I get offended....a bearded hippie looking guy comes out from the back and says "oh, you're early it'll be out in a bit." I find it amusing that a previous post said the same thing. Ok, back outside we go. I'm watching the 3 girls running the front and/or manning the tables(all wearing gloves) ...all the while one particular girl is assembling pizza boxes and on occasion running her fingers through her hair and realigning her Nightmare Before Christmas beanie(yes, with the same gloves). I kind of lost my appetite when she pulled out the huge mayonnaise jar and was filling up who knows what, all I noticed was her stringy blonde hair hanging directly in the huge mayo jar. Ok, fast forward...the bearded hippie guy finally comes out with our order and as I proceed to explain to him what I've witnessed through the front window wanted to get argumentive. He didn't want to hear it. He accused me of going into the restaurant rudely asking about my food order three times. No dude...I could not place a phone order. Number one reason to go in your establishment was to place our order, number two was when we got back to check on the order, number three was when I simply asked if it was almost ready. He quickly accused me of "yelling at his girls." No one was ever rude to anyone. He literally threw the food in my sons hands and abruptly told me I should be wearing a mask....ummm...none of your patrons are. I asked him for a manager and he said he was the owner...lol...Longest story short, I sent my husband in to get a refund. I'm completely done...

Not very impressed with Vero :( we were greeted and seated right away, great! I ordered a water that never came even after asking twice. So I got a soda instead. We tried the garlic fries… they were good but somewhat soggy and pretty oily and had a pool of grease at the bottom of the basket. My husband asked for an Arnold Palmer and had to ask two more times on top of that before getting it and anytime I needed a drink refill I had to wait around and ask. Our pizza finally came out and that was absolutely fantastic!!! But again, the extremely slow service and lack of service at most times was annoying as our server kept going to the bathroom and would be in there for a while and each time walk out on her cell phone. Which whatever, do you so long as the service is good! But it just was heavily lacking. We asked for the check a couple times before finalllllly getting it. Yet another cell phone bathroom break to keep us waiting instead of just ringing us up 😵‍💫🥴😂 so instead of waiting for our server to handle the check we decided to just go up to the front to pay thinking that might speed up the process but to my surprise, they didn’t have change for a twenty and that took a while as well so I headed off to the car where it was warm because it was unenjoyably cold and borderline freezing inside. All in all service was awful and I don’t know about ever dining in again, but I’d maybe recommend for take out!

*Updating my review in response to Kristin: Hi Kristin, it is my "job" to write honest reviews, I'm really not in the business of getting anyone in trouble or teaching them how to better do their job... especially before Christmas - as when she was around, she was lovely; it was the overall entirety of the experience so in my opinion, that's where doing your due diligence would come in and what your security cameras are for, so I'm not comfortable spending any more of my time on the matter and will not be calling, as I write reviews all the time and never incorrectly tag a location... I actually wrote this review from the car while waiting for our change since the front register/hostess stand didn't have enough to break a $20.... ...

UPDATE We have not once received a response from anyone at this business regarding the poor service we received nor about the staples we found in our food. I sent an email to the restaurant as well and never received a response to that. I would think that someone would want to respond to either the bad review or the email. I now believe that the ownership/management at Vero Pizza only cares about themselves and not the customer whom pays their bills.

We always love to have Vero pizza when we are in town. A couple of months ago we had our usual order and my wife bite into her garlic cheese bread and had a couple of staples in her mouth that we found in the bread. We called the restaurant and they didn’t really seem concerned and finally ended up offering us 25% off our next order and they acted like they were being generous with that.

Well we are back in town for the holiday and decide to order again and when I told the person about having a discount on file they said since I wasn’t ordering garlic cheese bread the discount wouldn’t apply. They said the 25% discount was only applicable to an order of cheese bread which was not the way it was explained to us when the staple incident happened. I said I wasn’t interested in cheese bread after finding staples in our last order and asked if I could use it towards our pizza order and was told no.

I get stuff happens and I understand sometimes restaurants are going to have incidents where customers may find things in their food, it’s how the business handles it which is most important and Vero failed miserably. I work with many restaurants and customer oriented businesses where I live and can’t think of any business in central Iowa that would’ve handled it this way. For a family owned business you would think you would value your customers because that is who pays your bills.

We come to Phoenix every couple of months and always love to have your pizza but I can not support a business who doesn’t have any integrity and doesn’t stand behind their product and service and doesn’t value...