Swahili Village - Beltsville, MD — Restaurant in Beltsville

I was visiting my Kenyan friend and she took me to Swahili village. We ordered our food, when it came what we ordered was not right. My friend ordered rice with collard greens and I chipati with collard greens.

As soon as we got the food, we tried getting out waitress. She wasn't to be found. A lady provided water at the table next to us and we asked her to get our waitress. She said she would, we waited. No waitress. We then saw our waitress serve food two tables down on the other side of us. My friend called to her. She never looked our way and ended walking the opposite direction. Another server was near and we flagged her down to ask for our waitress, by this time we were almost done with our food. The waitress came out to ask what the issue was. She checked what she had written down. The order wasn't taken correctly. We had even gone through the trouble to make sure we were clear on the order. She asked if we wanted the collard greens to take home. We wanted it with the meal, not as a take home. We spent close to 30 minutes flagging people trying to get this corrected.

We asked for it to be corrected on the bill. When we received the bill there wasn't a credit. We got up from the table and went to the front of the store .There we asked to speak with a manager. She asked us what happened, then went to check with her staff. Came back and said that her staff had offered us the collard greens to take home .We wanted our bill fixed at this point. She said regardless of getting the side the meal was $22. I mentioned the sides were $4 each, so she credited $4.

There were a number of issues with the behavior and service regarding this:

1: The server never once the whole meal checked on how we were doing or if the food was okay. Or if we needed water .

2: Not once, but 3 times we had to flag someone down. It was the 3rd flag down that the person was responsive. Remember the 2nd time was to the waitress who completely ignored us. The 3rd person also followed up to make sure our waitress came back. She was the only one in this thing that did anything right .

3: The bill was not initially corrected and the waitress said she could do nothing. This was why we went to find a manager.

4: When we got the manager's attention, the manager came back and said what was described above did not happen. And had gotten argumentative. She didn't offer a means to have a more positive memorable experience. The credit should have been initiated by the restaurant, not by the already disgruntled customer, and it should have fit the impact of the poor service.

This made it even worse because I was visiting my friend who is leaving in a few weeks to move to Japan and had traveled from Ohio, so at this point I will not be returning at all for a positive experience and she was trying to share something of her culture with me. The food was good but the customer...

I have a love/hate relationship with this place. I've been enjoying their food since their earlier location. Mostly carried out and ate at home with my husband. I am African (not from Kenya) but I did live in Kenya for many years when I was a child. The food at this restaurant brings me comfort and familiarity of the life I had in Kenya in the 90s (this is the love part). There's something to be said about the convenience of having this place around when my craving for chapati and sukuma wiki hits me.

The hate. One day I brought our friends to this new location for a double date outing. This was the first time seating down here, after ordering carry out more than 15 times prior. The waiter was nice but timid. We placed our orders and enjoyed ourselves with drinks. My husband who doesn't drink alcohol ordered sprite as he was very thirsty. He quickly went through his drink and the waiter brought more. This happened maybe 6 times in the 2 hours we were there; the glasses were small.... we ate and asked for our check only to realize that the 6 refills were charged at $3 and change each. Shocked, we asked the waiter how come we weren't told that the refills were not free. She didn't have an answer and said we needed to pay.... No problem, we can pay but we want to know why we weren't told. We asked to speak to the manager. The waiter said okay and disappeared for 10 mins. We called her over and insistetd to speak with the manager. The arrogant manager came and asked us to pay the bill. Again, we mentioned that we can pay the bill but we wanted to get clarification as to the refill charge. He said that it was our fault for assuming that the refill was free. We disagreed and said that other than an upscale or a super niche restaurant, most restaurants have a free soda refill policy. The charge would not have been an issue if we knew ahead of time by either writing on the menu or have the waiter tell us as she brought out the drinks. We felt scammed and honestly we wanted an apology and understanding in that moment. What we got was scornful remarks and blame for not asking the waiter before accepting the drinks put in front of us. My husband literally said to the manager "we've been eating your food for years and after today, I don't want to eat here again or recommend this place." The manager said "okay" with an indifferent shrug and walked away. We paid our bill, walked out. Terrible customer service.

A few months later the restaurant had a fire incident and shut down for repairs. As of latest August 2018, it hadn't been opened yet or so I hear. If it does open, I hope they find a new manager to improve the...

I have a been a customer of Swahili Village since 2017. Yes even before the beltsville restaurant burned down. With recent management over that past two years service and quality of food has gone all the way down and prices have sky rocketed. Even if you do take out there is automatically gratuity attached. I’ve never seen this before in a business model.

I was contemplating even returning but yesterday sealed the deal that I will no longer be a customer, nor will my family. It took our food 50 minutes to come out, without any explanation until we called our waitress over. Of course she apologized but I informed her there must be some compensation for this delay. I’ve never had an issue with the time our food came out but this was ridiculous. What made it more ridiculous was that there was only 10 people in the restaurant. It was extremely empty. After they brought out the food, one of our food was cold, the other was extremely hot.

We called over management and they informed us they cannot in fact take anything off the bill. I was dumbfounded. There was two of us at dinner, and they offered the suya cubes ($18 worth) instead of money off our bill. I thought they would bring us each one and I would been okay. They came back out with one scanty box and I asked where the other one was. They said they can only be one. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never received treatment like this from any restaurant, especially one that’s at fault for having almost an hour delay in bringing out our food.

I asked them do they think it’s fair… they responded in saying they can take the gratuity off but our waiter wouldn’t get tips. But it wasn’t her fault so I didn’t allow that. On a $108 bill for suya to be all you offer and only for one person at that shows the lack of care for customers. I will no longer give any of my money to this establishment. From my favorite restaurant to the worst restaurant I’ve ever experienced. This morning as I’m writing this as well I feel so dehydrated from the food. I have been feeling this everytime I eat from Swahili in the past year. When we ordered food on Mother’s Day, my entire family was sick from the food. Whether they are using old oil or new recipes idk....