IHOP — Restaurant in Sumter

My family of six arrived at the Sumter IHOP at 5:15 pm on Saturday May1. When we arrived we were told that it would be about a 30 minute wait as “two large groups had just arrived and they only had three cooks working.” The total number of people in those two groups was 18 and were all seated on the left hand side of the restaurant. I counted 5 wait staff, other people busing the tables plus the hostess so there could have even been even more people working. The right hand side of the restaurant had two tables of people, 2 at one and 3 at another, who were either done or nearly done. We said that we would still like to be seated and that it would be fine if we had to wait for the food for a bit longer. The young lady actually had to go and get another person to see if this was alright!! Again not a social distancing issue as one side was nearly empty. We were seated and told that someone would bring silverware and straws over in a moment and we assumed that we could at least place a drink order. Well wrong on both counts as we were given the straws but no silverware and no drink order was taken. After 45 minutes my sister finally waved down a waitress to ask if we could at least place a drink order and were told that “I don’t know what you were told but my boss said that you were told that there was a 35-40 minute wait” and needed to go make sure it was ok. After having been there an hour we finally were allowed to place a food order. We saw other groups come in and were seated immediately and waited on. One table of three actually came in WELL after us and had their food before we had placed a food order. When our food order arrived we had to ask for silverware as we still had not been given any and the hostess told us she would get us some plastic ware because they had no more regular silverware. Meanwhile there had been another group that came in only a few minutes before that and were again told that there was (still) a 30 minute wait so they left BUT their silverware was right there so we took that empty tables. Really no silverware during the dinner hours??? The one couple next to us, who we had a chance to get to know since we spent quality time together, was waiting for their check for over 45 minutes!!! And it was wrong three times! Over two hours for a quick family dinner at IHOP is ridiculous in the extreme. The hostess and one waitress might as well have hung out a sign that said “ CLOSED DUE TO LACK OF INTEREST”. The reason I gave them two stars and not one is our actual waitress was fairly new and a very...

Food: Average, which is acceptable. Service: Waiter was on top of it...no complaints. Atmosphere: Great. We go here often after church on Sunday evenings. Very quiet here. Empty We went here on Sunday, 21 January at approximately 700pm...... If this were my restaurant, i would find out which so-called "Cook" was working that night and i would promptly FIRE him. Their were only two employees working that night....the waiter and the "cook". We were the only customers in the restaurant at that time that night. After the waiter brought us our food, i noticed that my order of Bisquits and Gravy was missing the gravy.....i informed the waiter, who was very apologetic and courteous, went in the back to find the gravy.......now, this is a breakfast pancake house.......this joker brought out a tiny bowl of BROWN gravy....who eats brown gravy on their bisquits? Come on now, yall can do better than this. He then brought out the correct white gravy like whats in the menu picture.....but here is why i would fire that cook....as we were about to leave, i witnessed the "cook" exit from the back and go out in front of the store...like i said earlier, we were the only ones in the restaurant at the time. Upon exiting, to get out of the restaurant we all had to wade through a cloud of Marijuana smoke, right in front of the entrance doors. The "cook" quickly concealed a joint in his hand as a fresh smoke cloud was wafting all around him. Come on now....what kind of ghetto IHOP is this? Yall gotta do better. We all decided that we wont be back....and one person even said "So, thats probably why this place had to close down before, and they aint doing no better now.". But, you know what....i dont have much faith in anything being corrected on this, it seems to be the norm that everywhere you go you can just expect this...

I only wish I could give a ZERO. Absolutely the worst service ever. We were a party of 6 - arrived for dinner at 5:15 p.m. on Saturday evening. We were told the wait for a table would be at least a half hour. The entire restaurant had approx 30 empty tables. I asked if we could be seated and have drinks while we waited - knowing it would be a half hour wait.

45 minutes later we still did not have any drinks and had not seen a server. When I asked for drinks, it took an additional 5 minutes before someone came to take drink orders. AND - they would not take our order at that time. When I asked the server why she was not taking out order she said she was not sure what the hostess had told us. Two tables that came in after us and were seated quickly had already had their orders taken - 40 minutes AFTER our arrival.

We finally got our server to our table to take our order. We had already written it for fear it would be another hour before we saw her again. She read the order back to us (written on a post it note) and it was correct. She took that post it to the kitchen and turned it in for our order. Another one of the hostesses came to our table and asked if we had written our own order... and that no one had ever done that before. We explained that we were trying to save some time as we were all starving. 1 and a half hours after our arrival we finally received our omelets and chicken strips. It's IHOP for goodness sakes... not a five star restaurant. Not sure why we were there for 2.5 hours total - getting eggs! Absolute worst service ever and the two hostesses were atrocious. They even were going to give us plastic silverware - while those around us were all eating with regular flatware. DO NOT EAT HERE UNLESS YOU HAVE SEVERAL...