The Pancake House & Grill — Restaurant in Norfolk

Owner openly disparages and complains about customers and staff. I’m usually a happy patron of The Pancake House & Grill- but after this morning I will no longer be a customer.

Christmas is coming up so I’ve been working as a Postmates courrier to make sure my family is able to participate this holiday season. I understand some restaurants prefer to forgo certain platform services and minimize their clientele, and that’s perfectly reasonable.

I have an issue today as I very clearly was asked and voluntarily identified myself as a Postmates courier directly to the owner of The Pancake House & Grill. The restaurant was extremely busy, and I patiently waited out of the way of other employees and customers.

The owner was busy right next to me at her cash register, where she proceeded to complain basically directly at me for what had to have been at least 10 minutes . She complained about too many customers calling on the phone, complained about the organization of her station she supposedly was managing, that her business was crowded and even complained that people were paying her with denominations that according to her were too large for her to handle. She even went as far as to be curt and dismissive directly to her servers on staff for needing to make change for her customers.

And yet, I kept it professional and waited to place my order. I read off the order to her, and she asked to hold my personal smart phone so she could look over the order. I happily complied and offered to assist with anything I could. That didn’t stop her complaints! She even complained about the amount of sides that were being ordered. This is clearly not in the interest of the customer who is paying for their sides or the staff who is earning a living from working at The House of Pancakes & Grill and frankly I cannot fathom how this behavior serves her interests either.

Anyway, after that whole ordeal, I hand her my Postmates card and she turns to me and says “Oh you’re with Postmates. We don’t do business with Postmates. A delivery person didn’t pay once and Postmates won’t reimburse us. All they have to do is pay us, call them and tell them to pay us and I’ll take your order”.

Now mind you- business owners set their own policy and therefore assume the risk thereof about what procedures to follow when accepting orders, taking payment, and distributing food. Most restaurants require to-go orders be paid for prior to cooking and serving their food. Loss prevention. Basic business concepts.

For the sake of running a fluid business myself, and for my own personal customer service ethics- I calmly and politely tried to get ahold of Postmates Fleet Support Services to see if there were any way to resolve this issue.

I attempted to reason with the owner that she could be potentially damaging her own customer base by cancelling the order after such a long wait, and that I myself was a patron of her business and had spent a great deal of time and gas to facilitate a delivery that I was very upfront about being my sole purpose of being in her restaurant. As a last gasp at recouping my time and expenses, I point out that if someone were to come in her business and take cash or food- there’s no one to pay for that and it’s her responsibility to ensure proper payment procedures.

She snapped “Tell Postmates to pay us”, and walked directly away from me with nothing more to offer. Another, more polite and reasonable staff member apologized- I’m assuming on behalf of the entire establishment.

Good news is I left The House of Pancakes and immediately received a few more orders, all from professional and courteous restraunts and was able to deliver to friendly and appreciative...

My husband convinced me to try this place instead of ihop or Dennys, big mistake! We waited to get a table for about fifteen min, no problem there as it was a Saturday morning. Everything began to go wrong once we were seated. Right away we could tell our waitress had an attitude, but okay, I can understand and sympathize as I have worked in a restuarant and it is a stressful environment. We ordered our food and waited...and waited and waited some more. A whole hour in fact. As we were waiting we began to notice table after table of people who came in after us getting their food. Three tables were served before us who came in after us. We ordered eggs, pancakes and bacon, nothing that would take longer than any other meal to cook. Once our food came it wasn't even right and it was cold. I then asked our waitress if I could speak to a manager and she quickly tried to deflect saying what's wrong, I'll handle it. I explained to her that after waiting an hour we had finally recieved cold food and our order was wrong. She said I'll take care of it and left the table. She returned about 5 min later and told us she discounted our check 20%. Cool, I'm still not too happy but I do appreciate the discount. My husband went to pay and showed his military I.d. to get their advertised discount of 15% and the hostess told him she would not give him the military discount because we already recieved a discount. My husband explained to her that we recieved a discount because of the restaurants mistakes and she still refused to give us the advertised discount. So pretty much we get punished by having the original discount taken away because the restuarant made mistakes. And all in all they gave us an additional 5% off to shut us up. So after all that we are finishing up our meal and the hostess walks up to our waitress who is standing 10 ft. from our table and begins to talk about us, like I can't hear her, telling her about how we want double discounts and blah blah blah. And what does our waitress do? Says she knows, makes a face and waves her hand in the air. DO NOT GO TO THIS PLACE! Bad food, bad service and bad attitudes. I hope this gets back to a manager/owner, especially since if you request to speak to one while you are there they won't let you and try to sweep the issues...

Good food, nice place, poor service.

BLUF: The food is good and not too expensive, the dining area is clean and well organized, but the wait time from order to table was very long and staff were cold and didn't seem interested in interacting or communicating. Except, they are very interested in the tip you leave.

We had breakfast here around 9:30-9:45am, and the place was clean and seemingly inviting and comfortable. The initial interactions with staff were friendly and we were relatively quickly seated in a not too busy dining area.

Ordering drinks and receiving them didn't seem to take too long, but the wait after ordering food (Kid pancake combo, pigs in a blanket, and sausage & fries for my wife with food allergies) was easily 20-25 minutes.

During this extended wait, we didn't notice a large amount of to go or delivery orders coming out, and you can see in the images that the place was not very busy. However, the wait staff never checked in on us or tried to communicate any reason for the long wait. The only additional interaction after ordering came when they brought the butter out and gave my son a refill on his drink.

The food was good, and if not for what happened during the payment transaction, this place may find itself in the 4 Star range for me. However, the wait staff made my wife feel uncomfortable as she paid (I was in the restroom).

The staff held the POS machine in their hand and stood over my wife during the transaction. On the tip screen, there are three choices between 20%-27% and a "custom" button. While there may have been no intention to apply pressure to my wife, This kind of transaction is a common tactic used by people/businesses to pressure higher tipping. And while we can't say for sure that they wanted to be pressuring, there are also signs in/on the business encouraging tipping, and the whole combo feels purposeful.

By not being overtly (at least until the payment) malicious, the staff had earned a common 15%-18% for this kind of restaurant and food, but the discomfort of the transaction situation caused my wife to pick the middle option just to get out if the place faster. This is another reason why I feel the whole transaction was the way it was on purpose.

The food is good though, and the facility is clean, but we have no interest in...