Yianni's Cafe — Restaurant in Ocean City

Oh my, where do I begin. I’ve read all the wonderful reviews and thought what a difference from our experience. I’d actually like to give no stars but we can’t do that. Everything was bad. We’ve eaten a lot of great Greek food and this wasn’t it.The lunch chicken skewer over Greek salad wasn’t bad. The chicken was cubed and grilled. Chicken a little dry but edible. The two dolmades that come on the plate were horrible. Salty and filled with I don’t know what. I think they must have come out of a can. Can’t believe anyone would take credit for them. As far as my poor wife’s meal. She left most all of it on her plate. The chicken gyro was huge filled with lettuce, tomatoes and dried up, unseasoned, cold chicken meat. The pita bread was the best thing and it was cold not grilled or warmed. The Greek salad accompanying it was 50 percent bell pepper. The Greek dressing was olive oil in a little individual container. Oh and she got the chicken, egg drop with spinach soup. It was very tasty but other than a few very fine strings of egg and 3 or 4 pieces of spinach that was it. The chicken must have run through the soup cause there was none in there at all. Not one little piece. As far as our server Haley…she was no where to be found after dropping stuff at the table, she never came back to see how anything was, or tasted or drink refills. We had to ask another very helpful server to get us more dressing cause we didn’t care to eat the Greek oil and she brought it to us, Not our server. However our server quickly dropped the check off while we still had no tea and food in our mouths. I personally, got very agitated for the way we were treated and told Haley. I do apologize for losing my patience but I really do hope this is not your only job. Also we were there around 3pm. It wasn’t busy, so no excuses. We’re just visiting but for us Yanni’s is a NO...

Yanni’s used to be our favorite restaurant in OCNJ. We traveled from Cape May today to go there for my birthday dinner. But we had a horrible experience. It closes at 8pm. We arrived at 6:49pm and they refused to seat us. They said they stopped seating at 6:45. They said we could order take out until 7:30 but refused to include the free pita and hummus that comes with the dinner meal as it does not come with take out meals even though we were there for the dinner meal.

The customer service tonight was horrendous. They said it was slow all day but there were numerous patrons and families in the restaurant.

We decided to take our crying hungry children to the van so one of us could return to order. When my husband returned just a few minutes later (well before 7:30 as it is 7:15 as I type this and we are miles away), they had begun turning off the lights and said they were closed. They refused to take our order.

There were three ladies exiting that said they were not finished eating and the staff were turning the lights out on them to get them to go.

This is horrible customer service and I think Yanni would be disturbed to know his staff are treating guests this way.

The quality of the food deserves better.

Previous five star review below….

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Love Yianni's! We enjoy this restaurant whenever we come to town! It has been a few years since our last visit, but we still found great food.

They could use a better kids menu with more options. The breakfast and lunch menu are combined which made for some disappointed kids when they could not have pancakes at 3pm. I would suggest splitting the menu.

We love the fresh healthy flavorful cuisine. Complimentary pita and hummus at dinner is great! Definitely...

The food itself was good. The crumbled feta on the salad was delicious and the high point of what I ate. The lamb chops were passable but could have been cooked better. The worst thing we ate were the stuffed grape leaves, horribly salty and bland.

We had been a large group, 9, and knowing how hard it could be to serve 9 plus other tables, we were open to some space for error. The main thing that really made the slow service so hard to overlook was that we ordered an appetizer, and it came out after all the dinners were served. Our server seemed to disappear to the back a lot, we saw other servers frequently & they had runners bringing drinks and the complimentary pita and hummus (which makes the appetizer for 2 rather redundant btw). We didn't see our server from the time we ordered our meals until the dinner was delivered. At the end of the meal, she offered boxes (mainly for the large appetizer that no one ate as we all had our dinners at that point). The boxes came and were swiftly dropped off, but without containers for the dips, and by the time we realized the server was gone. We did try to get the attention of other staff but to no avail.

Yianni's had a steady stream of takeout patrons while we were there, and maybe that's the way to do it as service is out of order and incredibly slow.

*I didn't take pictures as our table was overwhelmingly...