Chili's Grill & Bar — Restaurant in Mountain View

TLDR: Non existent waitress makes for a bad post birthday dinner.

This was the worst experience I have EVER had at a Chili's and I frequent the chain often and have been to this location several times in the past. My husband and I came here for dinner and to use the free birthday dessert offer (99.5% just came here for the dessert). The visit kind of started off bad due to a 10 minute wait with a largely empty restaurant but I can let that slide as they may not have had many wait staff on shift or whatever.

This is when our extremely irritating saga begins... The hostess takes us to our table (2 person table with lots of larger ones available and clean) and leaves us with menus. We looked through them while waiting for our waitress and I noticed they no longer have mango chili chicken (this is the where the. 5% reason to go to Chili's came from). The Cilantro-Lime carne asada seemed like it could be a good substitute dish (I swapped the black beans for the fire roasted corn). My husband got the monster BBQ burger and fries. We also ordered a Watermelon Margarita, an unsweetened iced tea, and a glass of water.

Wait number two begins....we receive the margarita within a few minutes and were expecting the other drinks to follow shortly after but nope. Our waitress was nowhere to be seen for a good 10 minutes and once she appeared she walked past our table several times but didn’t acknowledge our attempts to get her attention to inquire about drinks. Another 10 minutes pass and the food shows up, still no drinks. Finally our waitress comes to our table and she asks us if the food is okay. We said we didn't get drinks and changed the iced tea to water. She returned with the drinks fairly quick but that was the last time we saw her during our visit. Shortly before we finished our entrees, I grabbed the tablet they put on the tables hoping that I can use it to order dessert… nope. We finished eating, polished off our drinks, visit the bathroom to wash our hands, and wait around for our waitress so we can order dessert but she never appeared and no other staff members came past our table so after the additional 20+ minutes of waiting for our waitress, I got fed up, paid the bill, then left.

The carne asada was cooked to the temperature I requested and would have been great if they didn’t smother it with the cilantro pesto as it is very overpowering. My husband enjoyed his burger and the fries came out hot and tasty. If the level of service came anywhere close to the quality of the food, it may have been a good visit.

Message to Chili's: Get more wait staff instead of having the majority of your employees working...

Update, New Years Eve 2022.

Made a simple To Go order for an Old Timer with Chips and Salsa.

Chips and Salsa order was missing the salsa.

Blackberry Ice Tea - syrup not mixed, too heavy, undrinkable.

French Fries were cold and not tasty.

It did not help at the app would not accept any of the usual payment forms, so needed to be paid inside. Going inside, cashier had to put battery in one of the payment kiosks, which boot very slowly. After a few minutes, she finally processed my payment manually.

Checking in curbside just took me back to the screen to Check-in - a cyclical process.

This is the only location I have gone to lately, but at least for pick-up it has really gone downhill. For obvious reasons we don't go here much any longer.

--- Previous Review from a few years ago ---

This location is better when it is less busy, in my experience. One can get a good value, although the food quality varies.

The environment also varies, there are times a game is on half of the numerous TVs that dot this property, which is a welcome diversion if you aren't fully engaged with your party, and the bar is small but a good viewing location is that is your primary purpose.

The reason I have knocked a star of the rating was our last visit consisted of problems that have repeated themselves from past days...on a Saturday night, after waiting to be seated, no one checked in with us at all (about 15 minutes) before we asked someone to locate a server.

The manager did come up later and asked for our order to help make sure it made it to our table in a timely fashion, it still was a bit slow, the salad was made with the item we asked to be excluded, the French Fries tasted a bit off, and the Chicken Crispers were not all cooked correctly (some overdone, but with some undercooked spots on the breading) and the corn-on-the-cob was a bit mushy.

It isn't always like this, but this sort of experience has occurred before, so for the most part, we don't visit at often, and rarely at peak...

I'm not one to complain, I actually have a lot of patience for restaurants now that it's been open for dine in post pandemic. I don't even know where to start except I should have just called it a day after the 50min wait time to be seated. But after waiting for so long and I had 3 hungry children, my party of 6 decided to stay. We were seated in what felt like an ice box. It was freezing! Ordered our food, (manually cus our tablet on table was dead) while waiting for our order, I had to collect all the jackets and sweaters in my car to put on and extras for our laps and throw on to cover up! It was freezing! After waiting another hour for our food, we notice other families were coming in and getting served their orders before ours. The manager than came, with what I thought was a complimentary chips and salsa apologized for taking long, our server never submitted our order and they are just now making our food. Told us he'll handle part of our bill and apologized some more! That was a really nice gesture to even admit. So we thanked him and carried on. After another hour of waiting our order finally came in! Long story short, all our orders were either wrong or missing something! We got our bill and everything was charged, even the chips and salsa that I thought was complimentary when manager walked over to apologize. Lol again, I'm not one to complain especially since clearly, they were short staffed. I tipped, only because the servers were still working hard, I should have brought up all the missing items that I was charged for but at this point my dinner at chili's took almost 5 hours out of my day AND I was with children, I was ready to go. I had to send one of my children to flag our waiter down for our bill. Food...