Pepper Lunch - Irvine Spectrum — Restaurant in Irvine

We tried Pepper Lunch for the first time with our kids. We arrived around 1:45 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon. A staff member at the entrance asked how many were in our group and said they needed to clean a table for us. After waiting outside about 15 minutes, we were invited in to find our seats.

Ordering was done through a self-service kiosk. We had the Beef Pepper Rice, Cream Beef Pasta, Beef Sizzling Curry Rice (upsize rice) and Chicken Karaage. The food was decent, but a few things stood out:

• The upsized rice didn’t seem larger, even though we paid an extra $1.99.

• The Chicken Karaage was overcooked and lacked the crispiness.

• If we want to order more food during the meal, we need to line up at the kiosk again. I personally don’t enjoy waiting in line once seated - this isn’t McDonald’s or a food court, and it takes away from the overall dining experience.

Since this is a semi-self-service setup, it would be more convenient if water, utensils, and plates were available at a central station for customers to grab as needed. The staff didn’t really handle those items anyway, so this small change could make things smoother.

Will definitely return if we are in Irvine spectrum...

I am so sad about this location because I was really excited for pepper lunch opening at spectrum. I’m a huge fan of the restaurant too, so it was a huge disappointment.

I went on a Thursday night at 7:10pm to go eat at pepper lunch, but the wait was so long that we didn’t get seated until around 8pm (we were a group of 2). We were going for my birthday dinner, but the vibes were gone after waiting for that long. The only reason we stayed in line was because we had the BOGO free card from the grand opening.

The wild part was that we would stand in line and see that there were open tables, several of them! However, people could only order at the kiosks or manually have to ask the person at the counter to take their order and I guess that caused a lot of backlog, but It feels like a really inefficient method because some people take forever to order or something. Even when they were done ordering, it would take maybe 5 minutes for the staff to allow another group to go order since we were in a line with those elastic ropes and poles.

This is either a staff shortage or they’re still in soft opening, but I was really looking forward to pepper lunch :( I hope things get better...

Tried this today for the first time and I'm happy to report the food is absolutely delicious and VERY fresh! The service was very good too--I could tell the staff were trained well as they were courteous to me despite being very busy. I will definitely be back here sometime soon.

I would change two important things, however:

1. Placing a simple sign at the front of the roped-off queue that says "Please wait here to order" and either shows a copy of the menu, or even a QR code, would go a long way. People queued up in line and all had to be told to go back outside to wait because there were no signs telling people not to simply walk in. Silverlake Ramen next door even has a small kiosk that is staffed to help with the glow of traffic--maybe that would work too.

2. At the order kiosk, it's s not immediately clear you can give a smaller tip than the default 15, 20, and 25%, though I eventually found the slider--weird choice. I'm sure Pepper Lunch didn't architect the software, but this interface should be changed by the vendor.

Overall a great meal, but those are just a couple of things to be aware of. If even one of these things is improved, I'll update my...