The Brunch Box — Restaurant in Omaha

After working here for approximately 2 months:

The food that isn't frozen and fried is microwaved. The twisted frozen yogurt is good, but is overpriced for the bottom of the barrel liquor used. The froyo is the only thing worth buying here.

When I was hired, I was told the pay is $10 for the first 5 shifts then it could be negotiated. I had to reach out to ask about getting a raise -- It was not standardized. The raise was non-negotiable unlike I was told. I was told I would have to have restaurant management experience to make more than $12 (may have been $11.50, I cannot remember). I worked for two years at Baker's as the Customer Service Manager (front-end manager) managing more employees at a time than the entire staff here, have a bachelor of psychology and human resource development as well as am a graduate student studying business psychology. I was told that our pooled tips make up the difference and that I could quit If I didn't like it. At this point, I started counting my tips to see if they actually did make up the difference (I have never worked for tips). This is where I noticed the owner was taking a portion of tips. After verifying with the NDOL that owners taking tips for work that they did not directly do is against the law, I waited 20 minutes after my shift (unpaid) to talk to the owner to ask her about it (because employees are paid a $10 base rate, the tipping laws are more blurry). She said that if the employees don't do 100% of the work, they do not get 100% of the tips. She never officially fired me, she just removed my access from the schedule and payroll. Further, all the owners' policies are skirting FSLA regulations. Love the idea of this place; hope someone can replicate it with more leadership experience.

First visit review: I cannot express how much I appreciate the owner of this place. Many people say more businesses shouldn't hire differently-abled people, but few do anything about it. The main [nationwide] organizations (that I know of) who hire people with [dis]abilities pay low wages and have minimal accommodations outside of legal requirements (think retail). It is clear that the owner went out of her way to make this place as accommodating as possible within her immediate control. The food is mediocre (average; 3/5 stars) for "brunch," but was the best late-night option downtown that I know of. The inside of the restaurant is beautiful and would make a cute date spot. Food is delivered via a robot to accommodate those who cannot carry trays (employees and customers alike), which is a neat idea I haven't seen implemented elsewhere. It is also the first restaurant I've seen where any of the options can be made traditional, gluten-free, or vegan, so those with dietary restrictions aren't limited to just one or two things on the menu. I hope this place succeeds. With more customers comes more opportunities for improvements (e.g., better food, greater accessibility, more locations to hire more people with [dis]abilities). I will be...

Positives: the staff was very friendly the atmosphere was cute, retro, and colorful the prices were affordable! large vegetarian and gluten-free selection (any item on the menu was available as regular, vegetarian, or gluten-free) you can choose a drink from the fridge with your meal and they have a great variety! There are also cocktails/frozen cocktails and fountain drinks.

Negatives: we’ve lived in omaha over a year and this was the first restaurant we immediately decided we didn’t like and probably wouldn’t come back to I had the chicken and waffles sandwich - vegetarian style and spicy. I thought overall flavor was good! It was a Morningstar chicken patty which is a good substitute but isn’t restaurant quality. The sandwich was also covered in syrup so it had to be eaten with a fork (I really didn’t mind this except if it’s a handheld sandwich, syrup on the side is probably better?) my boyfriend, on the other hand, couldn’t even finish his food. He got the brunch burger and the bacon was the thin, microwaveable frozen bacon, the patty was unseasoned and tasted microwaved, and the biscuit was really thick and not fluffy or flaky. even though there were only 2 other tables (one already with their meals), it took an hour from the time we ordered to the time the food made it to the table we watched a woman come in from outside with a ziplock bag of biscuits, drop it off in the kitchen, and leave which we think caused the delay, but was also odd. If they were out of biscuits, we felt like they could have asked if he wanted a different type of bread on his sandwich or if he wanted a different entree after maybe 45 minutes, she asked my boyfriend if he wanted his fountain drink and then told him he couldn’t have one because they were out of ice and told him to pick from the fridge, we thought they could have either just said they were out of ice earlier or offered the drink without ice? they had the server robots which is a cool feature but they had one outside the restaurant that just kept moving into our path when walking and they still had to accompany the other robot to the table so it seemed kind of pointless. I would maybe consider investing in better quality food and ingredients versus the frozen stuff instead of the...

The 5 star reviews of this place blow my mind. My husband and I decided to give this place a try as he is GF and we both love a good brunch. Everything we got was sub-McDonald’s quality, but was so pricey and came in super small portions. Who wants to pay an outrageous amount of money for a couple of GF waffles that you could buy in the frozen section at the grocery store and pop in your toaster? They also came out cold! The GF “cinnamon rolls” were hard as a rock and did not resemble cinnamon rolls in any kind of way.

I ordered the breakfast burrito which was not GF, vegan or vegetarian so needed no substitutions and should have been decent, but lacked any flavor and the quality of ingredients was not good.

Also, when ordering our meal at the counter, I had asked if I could try a sample of the fro-yo before deciding on a flavor because I had seen what I assumed to be sample cups next to the machines, only to be told that they would charge me $1 for a fro-yo sample and that those small sample-sized cups were the actual fro-yo cups that they considered to be an appropriate size for a side dish.

All of the food appears to be frozen and microwaved and all drinks are bottled, but somehow we still had to wait about 25 minutes for this “food” even though the place was slow and no one had ordered before us.

The robot is a pretty ridiculous gimmick and serves zero purpose and they still have to have an employee slowly follow the robot to your table to actually serve you the trays of food. 🙄🤦🏼‍♀️

The ideas this place has to be able to make any dish vegan or GF are great, but the execution has really fallen flat. You have to serve good food, not just have good ideas. Typically if my husband and have an unfortunate experience we will usually give a place a second try, but this wasn’t just a miss…it needs a complete re-do of the entire menu starting with hiring an actual chef to do actual cooking. Unfortunately I cannot...