BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse — Restaurant in San Jose

I want to to start this off by saying that the food was pretty delicious. I should have known not to try to order takeout from BJ's, but at 10pm on a Friday it was one of the only options that sounded good.

I placed my first call at 10:19 and someone picked up almost immediately. He said he would put me on a "brief" hold while he transferred me to the person in charge of takeout orders. I then proceed to stay on hold for so long (about 20 minutes, the next call stared at 10:33) that their hold system directed me back to the original person who answered the phone. I didn't hear anyone on the other end this time, but I could hear the background noises of the restaurant so I was definitely on the line with them. I try to say hello, asking if someone is on the line and hear nothing so I call them back. He answers the phone again, I tell him that I'm still trying to place an order, and he says that he told the takeout ordering guy like 4 times but would tell him again. I wasn't angry because I know that food service is a busy and unrewarding job but I'm starving and annoyed so I ask him if it would be quicker to just go down there and order. Screw it I'm hungry so I get in the car and drive down there.

My house is less than 5-10 mins away so I show up before 11 and ask to place a takeout order and the guy recognizes me from the phone and directs me to the takeout desk. There are two people at the takeout desk, one looking like he's doing something, but the other one was literally just standing there's facing the other way leaning on a table. The first thing I wanted to say was is it really that hard to pick up the damn phone but I felt kinda bad so I didn't say anything and just ordered. Now that I think about it I should've been meaner but whatever. They tell me it'll be 20-25 minutes so I go and sit in my car and come back about 20 mins later. I go up to the order desk and no one's there. I thought maybe if I call the BJ's phone line they'll pick up so I called it. No one came but the phone started ringing so I picked it up and started joking around with my friend saying things like "can I place a takeout order?" Into both phones. After about 5 minutes the guy came back out with our food and once I got home and ate it it was pretty good. But it took me over an hour (10:19-11:25) to even recieve the food much less come home and eat it.

Another complaint is that the Google maps menu is outdated and I ordered a grouped appetizer that I thought would have spring rolls, but the spring rolls were replaced with buffalo wings. I should've known to look at their official website menu instead but still you'd think they would look into updated Google maps.

TL;DR Alright food but absolutely terrible takeout service and not great...

OMG - the worst service and food from a chain restaurant, and that is stating it nicely. Let me start by saying that by the time you read this, I would have over 1.4 million views of Google review photos, so it’s not like I’m being petty. We were a family of 12 on an outing on a Sunday afternoon to celebrate a 4th birthday. Only 2 of us live in the area, while the rest were traveling from So. Cal. And Las Vegas, and we wanted one last meal to be together Believe me, this was not our first choice, and we paid the price. Where to start - I guess the first thing is that we received our food very late. Half of us had cold food - chicken, mashed potatoes, prime rib, sliders, broccoli. And when I say cold, I’m not saying “oh I wish this was warmer” - but really just too cold to be edible and served at a restaurant. One meal was to be a classic grilled chicken sandwich. It came as a fried chicken sandwich, with no condiment or dressing to go with it. The lettuce was wilted (pictured). 2 of us got our meals at least 10 minutes after everyone else. that’s usually not so bad, but considering many of us got cold food, why wait? We all spent a good 1/2 hour trying to get management’s attention on our food orders. After stomaching what we could, we did talk to the manager and servers, and we were to get our desserts comped. Well, that came with mistakes as well, and I’m not sure how many we got and how many we were to pay for, but I know it wasn’t correct. Since there were 12 of us, and different families, we did ask for separate checks. That didn’t go smoothly as well, and they put different people’s orders on different people’s tickets. We did notice that there weren’t very many food runners working at this time, and it was noted that there were 4-5 servers hanging out at the servers station, really just doing nothing. So this is probably due to poor management. To top it off, my brother in law, a Military Veteran with a disability, went to the restroom as we were leaving. The bathroom was such a mess, he slipped on the floor, almost falling to his knees. Oh yeah, the table next to us also received cold food and had to wait nearly an hour for their food as well. This was by far the worst restaurant experience. I used to like this chain, but really it has been going down hill for the past 4 years, and they may have hit...

Check your CC bill - they FORGED THE BILL to give themselves a 30% tip on my bill will correctly triggered my credit card fraud department. This restaurant is a fraud. On our last visit both kids had the kids meal - we all ordered at the same time but it turned out my son’s food never came. No explanation but when we asked the waitress just said ‘it will take how long it takes’ and was passive aggressive at us. Then the waitress said our pizookie was ready did we want that now or wait until my son get his food - we asked were they going to re make so the pizookie would be hot she said nope. So essentially we can wait for my kid to have his main food while 3 pizookies with ice cream would melt in the kitchen. When finally the last main food came we asked again what had happened and waitress admitted to having to re enter his order but was not apologetic. And I found a hair in my pasta, by then I didn’t even want to complain because they obviously didn’t care.By the way this was a random weekday 5pm so there was absolutely no excuse that they were overwhelmed.

After all this awful experience (1 hangry kid that had dessert before main food, hair in my spaghetti, endless attitude and no apologies when the service made mistakes) - we of course left tip that reflect how we felt. 10% which if you asked me was generous. But when we saw the credit card alarming us because the final amount BJ billed us for they added the tip to be 30% of our total. (We were 4 people so didn’t trigger the group default built in tip amount some restaurants have). All in all this was super disappointing- bad service, bad attitude, no apologies, food was sub par , and criminals for forging your tip amount to be 30%. Don’t worry though we are telling our true story to all friends, to share this experience because everyone needs to know how NOT to run a business. Do...