Willie's Grill & Icehouse — Restaurant in San Antonio

I have a very love, hate situation with this place. The food is fine, go in for a burger or wings? whatever, it will do for lunch. My wife seems to love the fish tacos, cool. But for some reason the way this place decided to make you order your food is not only frustrating, its a complete waste of everyone's time. Mine , the guy behind me in line, the restaurants, literally everyone involved. When you walk into this place, its clean, atmosphere is cool, people are chill, everything seems fine at first, but if you have ever seen a Friday the 13th movie, a splitting headache is lurking right around the corner... You have to walk up to the counter and order your food ( remember this part for later class) then the young lady, or dude, whatever its 2025, will take your order and instead of placing your order in the ticket que for the cooks to see, they will hand it to you and ask you to seat yourself. Once you've found a place to sit about 5-10 min later a waiter/ress will come by and with a smile and ask you if you're ready to order. If you remember from chapter one class, YOUVE ALREADY ORDERED, but instead of giving the ticket to the line cook for some reason its got to go through the waitress too. So instead of your food coming to the table you're sitting there like you're stuck in some sort of interdimensional time loop once again ordering your food and having to wait a second time to receive it. I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to reinvent the wheel here but It irritates me to no end. It makes no sense. Foods decent, people are cool but its too much runaround for a Burger and a coke and your score...

We've been here 4 times late 2017- mid 2019, different days and times of the week and weekends. All 4 times, we waited AT LEAST 45 minutes just to get our food and rarely have our drinks refilled by the servers. The appetizers, 3 out of the 4 visits, came out with or after the food. The tables were greasy feeling that last 2 times we ate there....not to mention the ketchup bottles. The 1st 2 times, we thought they were short staffed. The last 2 times, we were stupid to try again. 2 stars because we do enjoy the food but dang that minimal service is not worth any hungry stomach. Since mid 2019, we pass Leon Springs Willie's just to go to the Shavano Park Willie's. So far at Shavano Park, the wait for appetizers or first food dish has taken a max of 20 min. The extra 15 min drive to eat faster is worth it for a family with young children.

2025 edit: still, we will drive past this location to enjoy better service and honest marketing. Willie's participates in San Antonio Restaurant Week twice a year. However, the manager (Rene) here decides when he wants to honor the promotions or not. That leaves a bad business review for me. When we asked him why he wouldn't honor it, he replied with "what's the solution?" I and our party of 7 were appalled. I replied with "the solution is that this is false marketing. You either honor it or we walk away and definitely bring this up to corporate and pursue a lawsuit." Based on other reviews with bad coupon...

I love Willie’s however this location is terrible. The service was some of the worst I’ve ever experienced and the food wasn’t great either. We orders a chicken sandwich and the chicken was the size of large chicken nugget. We had to order another meal because it wasn’t enough food to fill up a toddler, let alone an adult. The service was almost funny how bad it was because it takes effort to be that bad especially since they were only 3 tables full. They didn’t get our order right, our waitress after getting our ticket never returned. Our food sat on the counter for 10 minutes while 5 servers were hanging out and laughing. We had to get up and ask for our food. Then we had to get up and ask for a to go box. Then get up and ask for our check. It’s as if we were asking them to go out of their way to help us. All I can say is… I love Willie’s but avoid this location like the plague… because that’s exactly how the servers will treat you!

UPDATE: Willie's replied to my review within a couple hours saying how sorry they were and wanting to hear more about my experience and how they wanted to make things right. So I spent time writing them a long email. I sent that email weeks ago and there has been no reply at all. This shows me that even their management obviously doesn't care because they haven't even followed up even when they asked me to. So...