First Watch — Restaurant in Naperville

This was an absolutely terrible experience from choosing to "wait in line" on their website to having to flag 3 separate waitstaff to actually get our check and pay.

Sunday is our one day a week that we go out and we were excited to go to First Watch for the first time, and we were sorely disappointed. We went online and saw the wait was about 20-30 minutes so I used the function to join the line online and headed out my door with my family. We got to the restaurant 15 minutes later and proceeded to wait for another 40 in the restaurant. During this time I saw 4 separate tables come in and get sat before us. Now they may have somehow checked in before us, but the room was full of the 8 OTHER tables that were definitely before us. There was no rhyme or reason to how people were sat and the online check in was pointless.

When we finally got the text we were ready to be sat we waited in line for a host only for them to rudely tell us they didn't seat people and it was the host next to them that sat people, who had a line out the door of new tables waiting to be sat. So we proceed to wait to find and opening to cut in line just to tell them that they texted us and our table is ready.

Now if this was the only issue I would still come back. This was just the start. We sat at the table for 10 minutes waiting for anyone to come up and greet us, finally our waitress came and we were able to put in our order. Queue waiting another 10 minutes for our drinks to actually show up. Then another 10 after that for our food. Our waitress dropped off the food and asked if we needed anything, we asked for refills, tobasco, and ketchup. They never came back. We finished our entire meal with dry drinks, and sat, and waited, and waited. Finally, I had to flag down another waitress who was annoyed that I bother them and asked them for help. I then proceed to watch her search for our waitress, garnering the help of 2 other staff members to look with her.

Finally a different waitress comes up, just to ask us if ours has helped us, we say no and she walks away... Now we still have no drinks, no check, we've cleaned our own table, and no waitress in sight. Another 5 minutes goes by and she finally surfaces from the kitchen, and starts helping others tables. Can you guess what happens next? There's a theme. We wait. We wait and wait and finally she comes up apologizing about how busy its been. It's no excuse, any one of the 3 people looking for her could have helped, a manager could have walked around to check on people, the 20 people they had on staff could have paid the smallest amount of attention to a table desperately just trying to get a check at this point and they all failed. From start to finish they failed.

Finally we get our check and this is the first time I did not have to wait. No line at the register, took my money faster than everything else they've done all afternoon.

The only enjoyable thing about the entire thing was the food, I will give them credit the food was very good, albeit small for the price, but it was good.

You're better off going to Blueberry Hill where the food is just as good, and no wait, or even waiting in the much longer lines...

We signed in through the online waitlist which said it was a 20-40 min wait. It also said to check-in once we arrived at the location. We arrived 17 min after joining the online waitlist, and let the hostess know/checked-in, she said it would be no longer than 15 min wait. After 25 min of waiting (and multiple parties coming in after we had already checked-in and just joining the waitlist at that time, and being seated before our party - we were also sitting right in front of the host stand so they could see us the whole time) we went to check where we were on the waitlist since it was taking a lot longer than we were told. It was only after going up to the hostess this 2nd time (again 25 min after arriving/checking-in with the hostess and over 40 min after first joining the waitlist online), that we received a text saying that we had been checked into the restaurant. We were then told our table was being cleaned off. We then waited another 10 min and asked again since it shouldn’t take that long to clean off a table, and we stated that we had been waiting quite a while and that it looked like the restaurant had not checked us in when we first arrived (since we didn’t get a text until almost half an hour after arriving/originally checking-in with the hostess), which means that we had been skipped on their guest list. The hostess then responded that she “couldn’t control how long it takes for a table to leave after finishing their meal”. [For reference, we were a party of 3, that arrived around 12:30pm, so didn’t show up right before close and not a large party.] It was at that point we again told the hostess that it wasn’t okay that we hadn’t been checked-in when we should have been, and that was when the manager (we think it was a manager) came up and said she can seat us immediately, which we were. Once seated, we ordered, and realized we had been given no silverware, and when we asked for it, we were told they had run out, so we got plastic silverware they use for takeout orders. One of our entrees was an Eggs Benedict (which when it came out, the eggs were hard boiled on it, not runny, which was disappointing) on thick ciabatta bread, so no way would the plastic fork and knife have worked, so about 10 min later, we asked for actual silverware, which they then had more of, so we got real silverware then. Even though the hostess (whose name we don’t know) was rude, our waitress on the other hand, Sheryln, was the sweetest. The other hostess/manager was nice and did apologize in the end when we paid. (And the original rude hostess who did not check us in never apologized) I have never written a review, for any place I have eaten at before, but wanted to make sure that this doesn’t happen to anyone else. Giving 2 stars because of the experience with the hostess/not being checked-in by the hostess, lack of silverware, and hard eggs on the eggs benedict. But again, our waitress...

We had brunch at First Watch this Sunday around 1 PM, right about the time their morning rush was dying down. We did call ahead seating and then waited another 10 minutes once we got to the restaurant. The feel of the restaurant is bright and airy. The people at the front desk were friendly. Unfortunately, our server was one of the worst servers we’ve had in the last several years of dining out. She was not kind or welcoming. She gave the impression that she was annoyed to be at work. When placing our orders, I asked to replace my toast with gluten-free toast, to which she said “I don’t think we can do that”. I showed her where it clearly states on the menu that there is no up charge for substituting for gluten-free toast (which is great, most places do have an up charge). She said “Maybe you’re right, but I think I’ll have to get a manager to do it”. I told her I really appreciated her time and that I could not eat regular toast because I would get sick. The substitution for gluten-free toast was the only modification that we asked for to any of our meals. Our food was delivered by a food runner, not our server. When our food came out, my plate came with the same toast that was on everyone else’s plates, and clearly was not gluten-free toast. And the toast was laying on the main part of my entrée, cross contaminating. Unfortunately, we never saw our server again. She never came back to check on our table, which felt crazy because we have never had a server not come check on how we were doing after the food was delivered (and it didn’t seem like she had any other tables that were keeping her busy). After eating what we could, I eventually walked up to the front desk and told them that we had not seen our server and that we were ready to leave, but didn’t have a check. I asked them if there was anyway for them to look it up. The guy at the front was really helpful, was able to pull up our ticket, and we paid and left never seeing our server again. We aren’t sure where she was, hopefully she didn’t have some sort of emergency, but it was an extremely odd experience. I definitely wouldn’t dine there again if I had to have the same server. As far as the food: 1 out of 3 people at our table loved their meal, the other 2 said their meals were only so-so. One of the people at our table had been there three times and said her other experiences were better and the food had been really good the other times, so maybe it was just a bad day for the restaurant. We will be looking somewhere else for our...