ZAZA — Restaurant in New York

TLTR; the staff is not l welcoming, nor professional, the food is a little bit over mediocre. —-

We’ve been here two years ago and it was amazing. However, since then, the manager as well as the most of the staff has changed. It does not have the local NY vibe anymore. I would give more stars than one, but unfortunately, I can’t. Let me tell you why:

Me and my family came to this place to have a nice family style breakfast, hoping to find the same quality of service and food as it was two years ago , but what we found was good food (not excellent), very mediocre service and absolutely ignorant, and rude manager.

We were a party of six people, unfortunately they did not have any seating available for six people, therefore they’ve pushed two tables together to accommodate our needs.

We were not offered any water as we were seated.

The ordering process was a little bit messy as it is common for bigger parties and since my mom was out in the bathroom, when the waiter was taking the order me and my dad accidentally double ordered the same dish for my mom. At the moment, we did not understand, but the waiter did not find that odd. When we got our food immediately asked what’s about the extra dish, cause it could barely fit on the table. Then he told us that that’s what we ordered meaning that me and my dad ordered two extra full meals (two plates each :-) ). We swallowed it as it was our mistake and we were not willing to ruin our breakfast over that.

When the food was served, most of us have already finished our drinks that we initially ordered , we were not given any additional opportunity to order more drinks until the very end of our meal, when they asked if we’d like to get some water.

When they brought the water, one of the glasses was put by the waiter in the center, on the edge of the two tables. As he put it down and turned away, the water spilled all across the table. I got wet, my wife’s dad as well.

We cleaned it by ourselves as the waiter did not rush to get some napkins or a mop, instead, he initially blamed us for knocking dead glass over.

We brought this to the attention of the manager, however, she told us that the two extra dishes were our mistake as well as knocking over the glass.

We did not escalate the situation further, however, when we got the check and the gratuity was included, we approached the manager and kindly asked to exclude gratuity from the check.

The response for this request was absolutely obnoxious, telling us that for parties six is included by default and we must pay. That’s when I told her that we’re not obligated by law and gratuities optional and since the service wasn’t professional, we are not feeling like gratuity is adequate.

The manager continued to escalate this by telling us we must pay while blabbing that there was nothing wrong with the service and that they must know what was wrong in order to discipline staff while she clearly knew everything that happened.

After the fifth time telling her that we’re not gonna pay the gratuity, she told us that we must leave the restaurant and we’re not welcomed here anymore and we cannot come back.

We confirmed that we’re not coming back ever and wished good luck with...

I'm not a huge diner person, though I'm from NJ and probably should be. I'm also not of the belief that this is truly a diner - I need old men in puffers at the counter with their personal mugs and a dive bar vibe without the bar. This is a brightly lit establishment with a cocktail menu (sounds like a normal restaurant to me), but NYC has their version and I have mine. I stopped by for a bite this past Friday afternoon around 1PM. This is a more touristy area, but not overwhelmingly so; it's a few blocks from WTC and Battery Park so a decent percentage of the customers have fanny packs and are staring up slack-jawed at the FiDi skyscrapers, but you could tell there were local residents and workers in there too.

The service was by far the selling point, and that's usually my experience at a legit diner. My waitress was super friendly and personable (she reminded me a lot of Canadian actress Colleen Dewhurst of 1980s miniseries Anne of Green Gables/Avonlea fame), stopping by throughout the meal, and everything came out relatively quickly. I'm starting to get massively spoiled by the solo dining experiences in this area, and this wasn't QUITE as speedy as other places but my expectations are likely not realistic anymore. For a lunch hour, it was more than acceptable.

The food was good for the most part, though not great. I went with the Eggs Pueblo (I think around $17-$19), which was Eggs Benedict with an avocado add-on. This is probably the only time I'm ever going to say this, but I actually thought they went too heavy on the avocado. I'm a huge avocado fan and 99.9% of the time I think places skimp on it, even when you're paying extra for its inclusion in a dish. This was LOADED with avocado though, to the point where it actually shut out the other flavors. Pretty wild and I'm not expecting to encounter that situation again. Similarly, the hollandaise sauce was pretty overwhelming too; I'm a big Eggs Benedict consumer and obviously I have to be at least mildly positive on that sauce by definition, but it was so thickly coated on everything that, like the avocado, it was easy to forget that the eggs and English muffin were there. That said, the rest of the entree was solid with a more than decent portion size. The home fries were excellent - well seasoned and well-cooked.

The weakest performer was the strawberry cheesecake, which was served and presented in almost a parfait-style (and even though I'm not a whipped cream fan because it's too whippy and creamy, I appreciated the attention to detail the waitress put into the prep). A few bites of it just tasted flat-out weird, almost like a metallic/sour taste. I'm not sure if something was off, and most of the bites were normal but in hindsight I would have bypassed dessert especially since I didn't exactly have a light meal.

My Skipper was furious that I went without her so I may be back shortly but I'm not in a rush. It was fine,...

Zaza's gets a lot of business, which might explain why Adam, who says he is an owner, interacted with me the way he did.

I asked to have the milkshake removed from the bill because it barely had any ice cream in it—it was basically chocolate milk. I didn’t notice what was wrong until I was 3/4ths done. When I told the server, she asked why I hadn’t mentioned it sooner. Obviously, I didn’t realize the issue right away because I’m not a food critic—I don’t analyze everything I eat as soon as I taste it. I was working on my laptop and only realized what was wrong after having most of it. I’m also a fast eater. They offered me another one, but by then, I didn’t want any more.

I spoke to Adam on the way out, who said he was an owner (it was definitely challenging to get him to say his role because first he just sort of responded with a “yeah what?” response when I asked if he was the manager or owner). Anyway, he promptly asked, when I mentioned my issue, in a confrontational tone, how much of the milkshake I had consumed and said: if you’ve had 3/4ths of it, you can’t get a discount.

So I asked the obvious question of whether, besides how much I drank, the low quality of what I was served was also a factor and confirmed that I had showed the servers that the milkshake was ridiculously thin. Adam claimed that the quality of their food matters "a lot" to them but then somewhat contradicted himself by refusing to take the milkshake off the bill because I’d had 3/4ths of it, regardless of its quality. So I asked if he would take half the cost of the milkshake off (which would amount to $6), but he refused that too, repeating his 3/4ths principle. I concluded that Adam thinks discounting half the cost for something that was 3/4 consumed was unreasonable. Maybe I could have gotten a 1/4 discount for the 1/4 that was left? I mean, they really nitpick if you ask them to address food quality problems.

A 20% tip is automatically added to the bill, so you can’t adjust the tip if you don't like the service. It’s basically a “take it or leave it” kind of place unless you complain before eating past a certain point (the halfway point? Adam didn’t say). For context, our total bill was $70—so it’s not like I ordered just the milkshake, drank most of it, and wanted to pay nothing and pull a fast one, but that didn’t...