Village Inn — Restaurant in Lincoln

This is the worst Village Inn I've ever been to in my life. I just moved to Lincoln and have visited this location a few times now since it's near my apartment. Each time, the hostess has done a terrible job of seating me, along with the other customers waiting. It shouldn't take an hour to seat 15 people when there are plenty of empty tables. In addition, the hostess seemed flustered and was actually cleaning off tables herself, even though there were empty clean tables all around and plenty of busboys who didn't seem in any hurry to work. It also took forever for the food to arrive, even though restaurant wasn't busy. Don't even think about going there on a Sunday morning, which I did today. Again, the hostess was totally flustered and wasted more time running around cleaning off tables instead of just seating people in a timely manner. It wasn't all that busy, yet it took me over an hour to be seated (there were only 4 tables in front of me) and another 45 minutes to get my food. It took so long for my food to arrive that my planned breakfast became lunch. In addition, each time I've had servers who were apathetic and uninterested in providing a good eating experience for me. This Village Inn needs an intervention! Is there a manager? Is the older hostess the manager? Either way, she needs to go and be replaced with someone more practical and able to seat people without wigging out over it. And the staff needs to learn how to smile and not disappear for 20 minutes at a time. Finally, somebody needs to run the kitchen and get the food out while it's hot, not an hour and a half later. Corporate VI, are...

Shrinkflation AND price increases....

I occasionally (maybe once every 3-4 months) will visit Village Inn with my family. Maybe a year or so ago they raised their prices substantially. That seemed pretty extreme as the food wasn't nearly as good of quality as other places with the same types of food.

Then just a week ago we visited here again. This time not only were those high prices maintained but the portion sizes have shrunk to around half of what they were. It was so comically small I actually laughed when I saw it when my food came out.

I had the chicken rice bowl and it was all of a dozen bites or so. The menu says it was 920 calories but it felt like about 400 in my belly. I'm a very fit and in-tune-with-my-body guy. I eat wisely and healthfully. I know what 920 calories feel like and that was not it. I left hungry.

I could go to Chipotle and get their burrito bowl for LESS money (my dish at VI was $15) and get about 2.5x the calories and portion size, AND the ingredients would be far better. VI uses absolutely garbage ingredients. Very cheap tasting food.

My wife's pancakes were the circumference of a can of food. It was just absolutely pathetic.

We will never come back here again. This reeks of corporate greed. Clearly other establishments have been able to figure out ways to make this work. Seems like the CEO of VI needs another Yacht.....

On the plus side the staff was nice and the restaurant...

Starting with the good: Erika, our server, great! She cares about her customers and truly is a kind soul. The food was good, hot and how I ordered it. The rest: manager Charlie: we were waiting at the host stand to be seated. He walked by us multiple times, never acknowledged we existed or were standing there. They were mildly busy with tables getting food but he was not doing any of those things. He was walking around wiping tables off and he could have acknowledged us in the 5 minutes of us standing there and him walking by us multiple times. He was not the only person to look at us and walk away, there was another server that did the same thing multiple times. Literally a hey I see you it will be a minute would be fine. Charlie came to seat us and there were several tables open but he put us at a table that was soaked. I guess we could be grateful it had been wiped down. 🤷‍♀️. Luckily it was the table we got because we got Erika as our server. Bathroom: what in the world is going on. It’s falling apart and was really dirty. (To be fair MAYBE we hit it right after a rush or something so maybe the dirty was from that) I noticed there’s new signage and other newer esthetics of the restaurant…maybe non broken tiles and a falling apart counter top in the bathroom and toilets that flush could get some attention rather than a new sign. All in all, I was...