Giordano's — Restaurant in Lake Zurich

I've been dealing with a severe bout of food poisoning after eating here & I've never gotten food poisoning before. We ordered the super veggie deep dish, it took over 45+ minutes to come out. I took a slice & started to eat when our waitress came over and boxed the pizza completely unprompted. We were all confused & family I was with said, "um, she wanted to have another slice here." The whole demeanor & attitude of the waitress made us feel as though we were sitting there past closing hours, as it was roughly 8:06PM we figured maybe they closed at 8PM or something. So, in efforts to be polite, I hurriedly ate two slices of this pizza. It was very heavy pizza. I was struggling to get through the second slice. We left around 8:16PM & I checked their closing hours once outside and saw that they closed at 9PM, which made their attitude a bit odd in hindsight. After getting home, I proceeded to eat another slice, so in total I had three slices of this pizza. None of my other family members consumed it, we threw the rest in the trash that night as it wasn't anything amazing & ridiculously heavy.

My symptoms began the following day in the afternoon, after a light breakfast at home. I wasn't able to eat any sort of lunch as I didn't have an appetite and my stomach was so bloated that I kept having to unzip my pants to let it breathe. My whole body got hot by the evening & I had a high fever, I couldn't get out of bed. I didn't feel like eating anything at all for dinner but forced myself to have some rice & then threw everything up, threw up everything that I'd eaten in the past 24 hours. My fever persisted the entire night. The next morning around 6AM I threw up again until there was nothing left in my stomach. I tried to drink a smoothie around 11AM but ended up throwing that up as well after a few sips. I spent the entire day in bed, scared to eat lest I throw it up. Around 5PM I slowly spent two hours ingesting a banana. After nearly 48 hours of misery after consumption of this pizza I'm finally exiting the nausea stage & entering the diarrhea stage of food poisoning. My stomach is still ridiculously bloated, I keep having to go to the bathroom every few minutes.

I just wanted to come on here to document my experience so that others who choose to go here can be more careful & hopefully not have to go through the same thing. After reading some other reviews it seems like people have experienced undercooked dough, cheese, veggies, etc. on their deep dish pizza from here in the past. So I don't believe it's a stretch to assume something had gone awry in that manner for myself as well. I don't think I'll ever have deep dish again, this horrid experience has entirely ruined...

I placed an online order at 4:30 to be delivered to my house at 6:30 pm. As of 6:45 I still had not received the pizza. I called the Lake Zurich location and spoke to a young man who answered the phone "hello" and the proceeded to not know how to take a phone call. I had to lead the conversation to get him to somewhat confirm my pizza was on its way... it was as if he didn't know where it was and then just said it was out for delivery to satisfy me. At 7:00pm., I called again and spoke with the same boy, who quickly turned me over to a manager. The female manager, also told me that my pizza was out for delivery but couldn't give me a time and also gave the excuse there was only one delivery boy that night. I then asked for some sort of compensation and she turned the phone over to Gerardo, who I then explained my situation for the 3rd time and he proceeded to argue with me saying the other girl was wrong and he had two drivers out... (I am not concerned with how many drivers they do or don't have, I would like to know what time my pizza will be there). As I led Gerardo away from arguing about how many drivers, he finally said he would call his driver. He returned to the phone telling me the pizza would be there in 7 minutes... which should have been 7:19 as I had already been on the phone for 11 minutes. Gerardo also blamed the mistake on online ordering and said it was a corporate issue and he couldn't do anything for. He did ask me to call him back and let him know how the pizza turned out... As the customer that is not my job, if he cared about my business, he would have placed a call back to me. The driver finally showed up at 7:27 an hour later with the pizza. Needless to say, I will be ordering future pizza's from Lou Malnati's...

Overall a pretty expensive terrible experience. The man who answered the phone was pretty unprofessional. He didn't know what the "wing flight" was after I explained it to him 3 times, and I had to direct him to look at the menu. On top of that he didn't even tell me what the total cost would be, he just said the food would be there in an hour and said bye. About 1 hour and 40 minutes later the food arrives. The pizza was cold and undercooked. There were pieces of raw dough mixed in with the cheese on my deep dish.... The crust was a light golden color, obviously undercooked for a deep dish. It took me a few bites to realize the goop on top of my pizza was a nasty mix of raw dough and cheese. The wings were cold and dry (seemed like they had been sitting for hours in a warmer) and the bruschetta was unappetizing and looked like it was thrown together with no effort. It is unfortunate that this experience happened to be on my birthday. I wanted to treat myself to something nice and decided to give Giordano's a shot after being loyal to Lou malnatis for so long. What a terrible idea. I am in shock that a business can operate like this. I am in disbelief that a professional establishment can happily take my $80 of hard earned money and hand over such an outrageously pitiful excuse of a meal. It's sad to see such an atrocious demonstration of customer service in my area. Maybe somebody will take charge and do things the right way...