Coalfire — Restaurant in Lake View Township

I have to leave a review because the service wasn't great, and the management engages in deceptive business practices. This is one of those places that charges a 3% fee for "sanitation and health" that you don't find out about until you get the check, which is not acceptable. That doesn't cost extra you greedy jerks. That's just part of running a restaurant.

First of all, the food here is fine. It's nothing amazing, but the pizzas we ordered were tasty. Spacca Napoli is better and cheaper, so I gotta give this 4 stars on the food.

Now, let's get onto the service. When we were seated, the server came and took our drink order, and I ordered the meatballs as an appetizer for us to share at the same time. My girlfriend ordered an Arnold Palmer, which they mix just before serving. It requires the bartender to make it. I ordered a San Pelligrino Aranciata, which is a canned beverage that requires zero prep.

The server comes back with my girlfriends drink but not mine...I figured she'd be right back with my drink after that, but we needed more time to decide on a pizza, so we told her that. I tried a sip of my girlfriends Arnold Palmer and it was delicious so when server came back for our pizza order, I politely asked if I could change my drink order to an Arnold Palmer since she had clearly forgotten to get my first drink. She said ok, and she would change it.

We sit and wait and still no drink. She brought out the meatball appetizer, we've been there for 20 minutes at least at this point, and I asked about the drink again. Then she comes back with the pizza about 2 minutes after the appetizer, which we barely got a chance to touch, absolutely terrible timing, and made us feel like we were being rushed out of there. Then, after we have all our food and have been eating, she finally comes back with my Arnold Palmer, and it's terrible. It was like they just mixed unsweetened tea with lemon juice.

At this point I just wanted to get out of there so we asked for a box, it took quite a while for them to box our left overs and bring the bill and when they do it's one of those toasttab qr codes where you have to input all your credit card info and do a bunch of extra effort to pay them. Great, not only was my service terrible, the restaurant wants me to do their job for them...and on top of that, they want to tack hidden fees onto the bill at the end. I should have just walked out without paying, but I'm a better person than the people who run this place so I'd never steal from someone like that. I tipped the server, not my usual 20% though and we left disgusted and angry at what should have been a good experience if not for the incompetent service and greedy management.

Do yourself a favor and go a little farther north on the brown line to Spacca Napoli. This establishment doesn't...

Tried out the place for the first time and ordered two pizzas, black & white and vegan pesto with Stracciatella. Server didn’t inform us that cheese would be extra and it would have been nice to know that. I am completely supportive of being charged but a courtesy heads up would be nice. The hostess was assigned 10-12 tables and it was evident she was stretched thin. Our pesto pizza came burnt and after waiting 10 mins, I went to the front area and spoke with the main host and he said he would pass the message along to the server. During this time I also saw another guest get up and grab the server because they had been waiting on their check for some time. I go back to my seat and another 5 minutes go by the server comes back and is not aware of our pizza situation which means the host didn’t pass the message which was disappointing. We ask for a Margherita which they are kind enough do make and bring out but we don’t end up eating much because we were full and lost our appreciate from waiting. We receive the check and notice we were charged for the Vegan pesto and the Stracciatella which was disappointing since we didn’t end up having that pizza due to it being burnt and were surprised that we got charged $28 for that pizza and not the Margherita that we received as replacement.

Please train your staff to provide support and communicate when they see a server overloaded with tables and customers are getting up to ask for service and provide feedback. It is the managements responsibility to staff properly.

The black and white pizza, albeit no structure or crunch, was tasty.

Hope to revisit and have a better experience.

Insane to think two pizzas, a fountain coke, and a cider totals to $67 bucks. Absurdly expensive for...

we were able to get seated right away and the food came out very quickly but we felt incredibly rushed by our server. She came over minutes after we got our pizza and asking if we needed a box. She came back shortly after and asked if we wanted the check, we hadn't even been seated for an hour. We took the check but also told her we were going to catch up a little bit, exchange xmas presents..ect ect She came back looking for the credit card and I asked her if she needed the table for a bigger party. (because we would have moved to the bar if that was the case) She then sent the bus boy over to clean the table and look for the credit card, and eventually I closed out but said we would stay for a little bit longer. We were there less than 2 hours, we would have gotten more drinks if offered, or even more things on the menu but felt like we were just being pushed out of the doors. Both of the people in our party worked as servers for years so we understand the need to turn tables when its a busy night but there were plenty of tables open and no wait that we could see. Maybe this server was done for the night and waiting for us to close out? If there was just a little more communication as to why we were being bothered every 5 minutes to when we were going to be done, it would have completely changed...