Peppino's Downtown — Restaurant in Grand Rapids

I just finished taking an in depth, 3 hour - 140 question exam at GRCC, for the International Green Infrastructure Certification. I wanted to celebrate having completed the course and testing so i decided to eat out(i don't eat out often, i actually enjoy cooking). Unfortunately, Google Review doesn't allow for more than one review so i had to delete my prior 5 star comment. Before today, my interractions with Peppinos has been 5 star rated - food and service. Today changed all that. I ordered to go but then thought, you know, I wouldn't mind dinning on the patio considering the weather. Long story short, the manager Chris said "I'm sorry, take out customers can't eat at the patio". At the time, there was only one other customer eating outside. He COULD have made an exception but refused. There was a female standing next to him laughing that i was upset about it, mocking me and cheering him on(real proffesional). It's the last time I spend my time or money there. NO THANK YOU!! Peppinos just got cancelled. I told Chris I'd do a google review and tell my friends...he didnt seem to care(as an experienced leader/manager, my training taught me that you should treat the business you lead as if you were the owner. I dont think the owner would have objected to occupying a patio table so long as i tipped the wait staff.) Bottom line, he COULD have let me sit and eat(i offered to give waitress a tip) and he didn't want to. I called him doo doo(paraprashing) and walked out. There is no other side to the story. I made a complaint about the food and Chris refused any compensation. And yes, my complaint with the food was more about declining to financially support an unfriendly service environment. ** There are 2 other factors for how i was treated 1) i wasn't dressed or groomed to the nines, so he probably felt validated treating me like a vagrant and 2)I was wearing a Trump 2020 hat - lots of "WOKE" people have a...

Had a Saturday wedding in the hotel across the street from Peppinos. Friday night a group of us go there for a beer and the servers were immediately extremely rude to us. We were not rowdy due to having a wedding the next day, and couldn't figure out what we were doing to be so irritating to the wait staff. We were a larger group, but we all had seats either at the bar or the high top tables and some people stood directly next to the table to stretch their legs due to just traveling for the wedding. It was not a pleasant experience with the wait staff, but we continued on with our drink to two and left for the evening.

We went over there Saturday for our last drink of the evening (10:30pm which is well within hours of operation of closing at 1am) and they REFUSED to serve us because our group was just SO disruptive the day before.

I was mortified to hear how disruptive our group was. So, I talked with the hostess and then the bartender to figure out what happened the night before, so if there was an unpaid tab or something that I could pay for it and correct that error to make sure everything was handled appropriately.

The hostess proceeds to tell me the only problem was that we cannot sit at the high top tables. Then, I conversed with the bartender, and she said we MUST sit at the high tops. But as for why we were so disruptive was because we were standing near the bar compared to sitting completely in chairs? It was bizarre and did not make any sense.

We ordered the wedding late night pizza from there and it was just fine. We also were proceeded to get yelled at for just holding those Peppinos pizza boxes as leftovers to the bar.

All in all, both nights the service was terrible and truly just rude. I do NOT recommend this place unless you want to get yelled at for...

We had a party of 10 coming from out of town and we had heard great things about Peppino's. I had called to make a reservation and the following day they canceled my reservation. They told me they couldn't make any reservations for the time of the MSU game, so just show up and put your name in. We did just that, and waited about an hour to be seated. Before we were seated, the manager came up to us and told us we could have a table, but we need to leave by 7:30. This was at 6:30. All of us agreed but were very confused as to why we were only given one hour to be there as paying customers. Our party of 10 was sat at a table that was only big enough to seat 7 people. We ordered and waited 45 minutes to get our food. At this point we decided we were not leaving at 7:30. When the food came, it was cold. One of our group members in particular had ice cold macaroni and cheese. It was sent back three different times- each time still coming out cold. We even asked them just to throw it in the microwave. They didn't comply, and refused to take it off of her bill even though it was basically inedible. Over all the food was mediocre, and cold for the most part. They couldn't split the bills up correctly on 10 different tabs. We ended up being there much longer than we had wanted to. Our group and their friends will no longer return to this peppinos. Unfortunately we were treated very rudely by management and the kitchen staff. The waitress was great and it's unfortunate because none of what happened was her fault. I'm disappointed, as I had previously heard great things about peppinos. For my next trip to Grand Rapids, I will be taking my...