Islands — Restaurant in Mission Viejo

I frequent many different Islands locations. I go to Islands at least once a week if not more and always leave great reviews. I have never had a problem. We love the happy hour. My go to drink is the Mai Tai. They are fantastic and happy hour prices of $5.99 can't be beat. However we went to the Mission Viejo location this past weekend and were very disappointed in the service we received. We were in the bar, it wasn't happy hour and ordered Mai Tais, $11.99. The Mai Tais are premixed and are always the same. Then they are to float dark rum on top. We ordered at total of 6 drinks and none of them had the dark rum. When we brought this to the servers attention she stated that they are to float one once of dark rum on top of each drink, which she said she did. It was obvious she did not, especially to someone who regularly orders this cocktail. The dark rum is very visible . All would have been ok if she just handled it but she was very rude. Horrible customer service. We were so disappointed. We were raving about their drinks to our friends and then this happened. It seemed like such a small thing for her to do to make the drink right. She chose not to. She would rather have unhappy customers. Oh well, we will still be regulars at happy hour. Just not the Mission...

I am quite surprised that this chain survived the pandemic shutdown. We tried to order from them several times during the "take out only" phase (my mother-in-law likes their food for some reason). Each time we backed out of the order due to the overly inflated prices. This included them applying "Covid" fees to an order that we were going to pick up and we ordered from the app.

Flash forward to last week, we went there to celebrate my birthday early, due to it being convenient and empty of patrons. Not only did they not offer anything in way of a birthday celebratory desert; they have made all the "burgers" ala cart and the french fries are no longer bottomless. We're talking about potatoes here, one of the cheapest things to source and cook on the menu. I know this because I know several successful restauranteurs who have said so.

Worse still, their burger meat is even more wafer-thin than it used to be and the plant- based option is just as thin but you pay a premium of $3.00 for it. They also charged me extra for two slices of avacado (not half of one which is the standard).

That was it for me... Screw me once, shame on you... Screw me twice... Shame on me and nope I...

I received a delivery order, but do not think the issue I had was due to the delivery. Let me explain:

I ordered a couple burgers, a salad, and a wrap. My burger came with what turns out to be 2 flies inside the clamshell. Why do I think this happened when the food was packed? Because the clamshell is pretty tight (with air vents, but I'll tell you even more why this doesn't matter), my burger was down under several other boxes and the bag was taped at the sides. I opened the container to get to my burger and immediately saw a large fly crawling on it. Not on top of the bun, on the side of the burger. It flew out and I smacked it. I threw the entire box in the trash. I was filling out the complaint to Uber (that's $20 I'm not willing to waste), it had the option to take a picture of the item, so I went to my trash, opened the container and ANOTHER fly flew out. I know it wasn't the original fly as I took that one out to my planter in case a lizard needed a snack.

This was one of the few places I could reliably get a good turkey burger from in my area....