First Watch — Restaurant in Harrisburg

Update: The wife and I plus a friend decided to check out FW (my first time since original review below). Overall a much better experience! We got there at 8:30 AM and by 9 it was packed! I got the Belgian waffle with berry compote (it came with warm maple syrup) and we got to try the million dollar bacon. Bacon was outstanding; sweet and a little spicy but also crispy and fatty! Service was friendly and way more attentive Inside. Only negatives were that we had a couple of missed parts about our order so they had to make over a couple items. I’ll bump up FW to 4 stars after this experience.

Original Review: Well… I’m just gonna say my expectations were somewhat low and First Watch still fell flat.

The good: service was friendly. We didn’t sit inside but the vibe, although loud inside acoustically, was nice. Some of the food items like the potatoes were excellent and tasty. I enjoyed my fresh squeezed orange juice. And the best part was that they opened their closed outside section for us so we could bring our dog outside to eat with us. After the breakfast sandwich we ordered didn’t come with bacon as advertised our server gave us a plate of bacon.

The bad: no one at the front to greet us, rather someone at the cash register with her back faced to us and we had to wait a few minutes to be greeted. We were told after ordering that the kitchen was backed up 30 minutes. I do appreciate our server telling us this but ideally we would be told up front before we even sit down. Our table was dirty and sticky so we had to ask for them to clean it. The food came out 40 minutes later and you could tell most of it was frozen beforehand like the biscuits. Eggs were over-cooked. The breakfast sandwich was advertised with over-easy eggs and bacon and did not come with either; the eggs were hard-boiled and the bacon missing. Pancakes we ordered did not come with syrup. After waiting several minutes for our server to bring us some she did not (she later told us they would give us some syrup to go and they would not charge us for it - we hoped they wouldn’t charge us and didn’t understand that, but it came in a nice glass bottle which made more sense for that comment).

The verdict: First Watch, at least at this location, has a lot of potential but a lot of areas to improve. I am puzzled why it would take 40 minutes to wait on breakfast food for any reason. I’m no restaurant manager but there has to be some sort of inefficiency somewhere. Either they are short staffed, not capping the amount of people they serve with wait times, or something else that could be tweaked to fix the issue. A glaring disconnect to me is expectation management. If you sit me down now, I expect to place an order and eat within the next 15-20 minutes or so. Tell us up front how long the wait will be, not after we have jumped several hoops. Tell us you won’t charge us for to go syrup that comes in a premium bottle instead of making us think you won’t charge us for a a plastic cup of syrup. If waiting is a chronic issue (which it appears to be from other reviews), it needs to be addressed and in the meantime over-communicated from the jump. Also, if you’re going to make us wait 40 minutes for food, at least take care to make the biscuits from scratch, soft instead of hard scramble the eggs, etc. Take care in the little things. It’s clear some of their food items are really good, but this isn’t consistent across the board. Proactively clean the tables and think ahead; take pride in what people expect as standard service. I’m disappointed that I couldn’t try at least a few bites of the pancakes fresh and at the restaurant all because we waited a long time for syrup that never arrived; that’s a bad look! I’d love to see this place improve and hopefully my comments can be taken to heart as helpful feedback and a sign that I care about First...

We have been to this location before and the service and food were way better at that time (about a year ago). We decided to go again with our children yesterday and joined the waitlist online (gave us a 30-45 minute wait) which is no problem because we were heading that way anyway. We had about 15 minutes left on our wait time when we checked into the front. The lady who was checking us in was nice but when I asked her estimated how much time was left for our wait she told me 30-45 minutes which I kindly explained to her we had already joined the waitlist and waited about 30 minutes. She then proceeded to get defensive and told me that the wait doesn’t start until you check in and that she can get the manager if needed to explain. Why the sudden aggression by asking a simple question? This had all confused me because what is the point of the waitlist if you still wait the normal time at the location. I told the lady that it wasn’t necessary to get the manager and we would wait. We took about 3 minutes to go and park our car because the parking lot was very full. I looked at my phone and get a text saying our table was ready. What happened to the additional “30-45 minutes” we had to wait? No problem - we got inside and told them we got the text that our table was ready. A gentleman im assuming is the manager at this point told us to go sit down while they get our table ready. Then I got another text that we were removed from the waitlist. We went back to the gentleman we spoke to earlier and he told us they texted us so many times and got no response that we were removed. That was a lie because we were not texted multiple times to come for our table and we were already inside waiting when we got “removed”. This caused us to wait an additional 20 MINUTES to get another table while waiting inside with 2 children. We ordered our food and honestly it wasn’t that great. We liked the variety option for meat as we do not eat pork and when we wanted to order the Chicken Apple sausage they were already out of it…at 11:00 AM. So we got the turkey sausage which was links and not a patty and honestly they were disgusting. Very rubbery and looked barely cooked. I got the biscuit with sausage gravy which comes with eggs and potatoes and the only thing good was the biscuit and gravy. The “2 eggs” looked like 1 sad egg and the potatoes were still crunchy. My husband got a Belgium waffle with potatoes and grits and I have to say those were the worst tasting grits I’ve ever had. We had to add salt to a lot of the food and I barely add salt to my food. My son loved his grilled cheese. The Pineapple Express drink was delicious. Those are the only 2 nice things I can say about the food. Our waitress was sweet but very absent and barely checked on us. I don’t think we will visit First Watch again for a long time because this was such a disappointing family experience. The food is somewhat reasonably priced for today’s economy but still pricey for some families so beware...

As soon as we walked in we were seated, which was great! I decided to use the restroom and came back out b/c there are only 2 stalls, one was taken and the other was filthy with toilet paper all over the floor on top of a urine mess. I waited for the other stall to come available but the other person had taken a while so I left back out. Proceeded to tell Skyler the bathroom was very dirty and she said she would let the manager know. Got back to my table and my girls stated they hadn’t been greeted yet, by the time I sat down another 15 minutes goes by and a waiter finally comes and states he didn’t know he had someone at the table although he had passed our table a few times unbeknownst to me hr was our waiter. Placed our orders, and we received our food, I ordered an eggs Benedict blt and potatoes and my food was cold, my kids ordered 2 shrimp and grits and the shrimp was beyond salty. I sent my food back as we had waited too long to put our orders in for me to get cold food and the eggs were way too runny and I requested it to be medium to well cooked. I received my food and it was much better this go round. We were getting ready to leave and we had been here a little over an hour already and my kids decided to go to the restroom. They stated it was still disgusting. I told them I had told the hostess Skyler about it and I guess she did nothing. Go to checkout and stood there a good 5-7 minutes…Skylar and another guy with dark hair saw us standing there and never came to check us out, proceeded to act as if they were too busy cleaning a table when they were really standing there while she was holding the broom and lollygagging with the guy who was busting the table. A nice waitress who had seated us came up front to check us out after we had been standing there for a while and that’s how I found out who the not so courteous hostess was. All of this to say…I would not patronize this establishment again. I usually don’t leave bad reviews, but this experience from the wait to order, the restroom, food temperature, to waiting to checkout as two people just sat and stared instead of helping. I asked if the food was free today b/c no one wanted to assist. I’ve been to this establishment once before but after this…I won’t be back. I wish I had taken pics of how nasty the bathroom was. Please look into hiring staff who are more attentive and courteous as the waitress who initially seated us and checked us out did. I was there today btwn...