Schmooze — Restaurant in Scottsdale

A lot of arrogance permeates this snooty old town Scottsdale coffee shop. Its essentially a luxury real estate office pretending to be a hipster coffee shop. Meh. Not the place I would choose to Schmooze at again - as the management here treats customers like dirt. Its obvious they see the coffee operation & space as a cash-cow, and customers as doormats.

Yesterday I rented the "Ernie & Bert" conference room which I was quite familiar with from having been there 3 years ago for some business work. Used to be a wonderful and cute room! Not cheap at like $150 for 2 hours.

To my surprise the room looked NOTHING like the old days OR the photos still on their website. The walls no longer had the funny & hilariously colorful portraits of Ernie & Bert from the famous scene in PULP FICTION with guns (which is what the room is still called, with those pictures of the room still on their site).

Now the walls are nearly barren, beat to hell and with paint scuffs everywhere. Every armchair had the arm padding ripped (to shreds - not a little but a LOT). For a company that is in the real estate business charging top dollar for conference rooms - this room was an embarrassment. They chopped the rooms up from the last time I was there (when it was really cool and cute) and now its just a junk-pile. I would never bring a client here again. Big mistake. What happened guys? Yikes. And this is a company that sells upscale real estate properties? The conference rooms no longer pass muster fellas.

When I tried to complain none of the staff really cared. They said that people had complained about the funny photos of Ernie & Bert from the scene in Pulp Fiction with them holding weapons and so they removed them. "OK, I said - but WHY ARE YOU STILL SHOWING THAT ON YOUR SITE? WHY IS IT STILL CALLED THE ERNIE & BERT ROOM?" A room that used to be cute/clean and spotlessly fun? No answers. No one cared.

About 15 min before 3PM (closing and the end of our rental) a rosy faced young man came over (without a smile and a surly attitude) warning me to leave the room soon as they were closing. No mention of asking how was the room? No thank you. NO greeting. Nada. Just more or less... get out ASAP, OK.

This place is obviously a great location cash cow (and write off) for the owners - but a shill of a coffee place or meeting room spot. Great coffee spots exude genuine love, warmth, care for their customers - not treating customers as props. Authenticity cannot be faked. These people don't event try.

TIP: Click on all the LOWEST Google reviews here rather than scrolling through the algorithm feed- and you will 100% see an obvious pattern. Darn shame as the coffee here is decent. But to me that isn't enough. A business needs to treat their customers and environment with care.

I get it! As a consumer and business person I have options too. Schmooze is off the list...

Where should I start… Me and all of my friends (sometimes up to 16 people) have this monthly meeting every first Saturday of the month for coffee! We are Ukrainian refugees. We used to come here for the last 5 months and we loved it! Fresh air, good coffee, food was fine, servants. Every time we would meet at 10am and stay just about noon or something we would even stay for lunch! So, we would order coffee and breakfast, lunch and drinks. On April 5th we came to this place again and the owner was covering hostess spot. We came up and he asked how many? I said now it 8, but more on the way. He said he won’t settle us until every one is here! And the way he said it made me feel unwelcome! But, we decided to wait! When everyone was there we asked for the table. On the way to the table he was complaining the we come and “seat and talk forever”! It was said in the way like we come there and buy nothing! Using the table for free! And before, while we were waiting he spoke to me in a really rude manner in front of other customers. He was keeping us aside and almost yelled at me! I felt like someone poured a bucket of cold water on me! I felt a great level of disrespect and racism towards me and my friends! So, we got our tables, we made orders, we give tips to servers but we will never come back! I do understand that at this times people are filling like they can show now their real preferences in client and they don’t have a problem with getting customers at their restaurant. But, you can’t do this in this line of business! I haven’t experienced such racism ever in my life! Oven in Italy (if you know what I mean)! We loved this place. And this place became like this because of Hurd working people who come there to spend time with their friends and so you could make your profit on them! You build your place like this, because we come to spend our money there! Well, now we will go elsewhere! It’s so many other great places in Scottsdale and around town!

Take...

We work at a nearby restaurant and decided to try this place. Food was pretty good but service was absolutely awful this day. We tried to order online at 233pm. It would not take our payment so we called to place the order. We were told that they don’t take phone orders and we had to order online. Ok what? We explained to her that it wouldn’t take payment but we can pay her over the phone. She said she can’t do that. What? Why? Ok, so we walked over there and now it’s 245 and we were immediately greeted with eye rolls and these words “we close in 15 minutes”. Not hi, welcome in, what can I get started for you…nothing even resembling a welcome feeling. We explained that this order could have been done by now but nobody would take our order (they probably turn off online ordering 30 min before closing). The girl behind the counter says that the owner told them to give people a 15 minute “warning” that they close at 3. Ok, but we were taking our food to go anyways so what an unnecessary comment. I really wish we would’ve just turned around and left but we had a group that already picked out their meal from here and we were hungry. I got 2 chicken salad sandwiches with 2 orders of fries and when I looked in the bag, there was only 1 order of fries. I told the young lady this and she said she put them both in the same box. I said but they’re for 2 different people and she looked at me and said “I told him that but he still put them both in 1 box”. Mmmmmk, well I need them in 2 boxes. She fixes it with no apology, just attitude. We did ask to see a manager and apparently there was no manager there?? She told us the owner Tony would be in the next day. I would definitely want to know if my staff was making our guests feel like a burden. Nobody really enjoyed their food because of this experience. We definitely won’t be back but thought maybe Tony would like...