Café Zupas — Restaurant in Vernon Hills

Went in to order today to-go for me, my wife and three littles. The person taking my order at the counter cut me off and informed me that if I needed to order more than three menu items, that it would have to be an online order. They said that this was a corporate policy, but they really were not trying to help me out. When I spoke to the manager, she said more or less the same, and said that it was to reduce the order line wait time.

We both looked over and the line was EMPTY (and had been for the past 15 minutes) when I explained that that rule shouldnt be a thing when its not busy, but the staff was not really interested. To their credit, they did inform me I was forgetting my extra fruit cup (which you cannot order online a la carte), but the man at the sandwich line was borderline rude.

Had my wife not been madly in love with the food, which is really great imo, i would have just gone elsewhere. The policy got in the way of a smooth transaction, and embarrassed me when I was cut off from ordering, an experience that does not exist at any other cafe or fast food place in the country.

I probably won't be back, my family of 5 can...

The menu items are generally excellent and price/provision ratio is acceptable. Staff deployment/allocation is, however, extremely poor, and this results in even the most pedestrian order taking, it seems, 20 minutes to complete. Staff on duty seemed improperly deployed and the apparent manager ill-equipped to adjust or correct as required. In summary, good food, poor apparent human resource use and management.

The larger Hispanic woman, the titular manager, needs to be trained on staff deployment so that, when multiple customers are standing in line for the privilege of being debriefed of their order vis a vis her rather acerbic demeanor, she somehow figures out how to shift, say, a person wiping down tables, to a register or order taking role to ameliorate the queues that otherwise quickly manifest yet slowly (painfully so) resolve. Other reviewers have noted the same bottleneck and whatever bot responds to these reviews insists that the "operations team" will be apprised of the situation but apparently either said "team" is asleep at the wheel or AWOL or both. Longitudinally speaking, nothing seems to...

Always liked the food here ... but giving this location a 2 star cause of the service .. we ordered 2 of the pick two and ordered 2 extra strawberries.. for which we were charged .99 each. Now comes the frustration... our order was ready but the cashier was on phone for sometime and we have to wait 10 more mins before she noticed it was on the counter.. then we asked to confirmed that the extra strawberries were in or not ... she said yes ... when we came back home they weren't... i get they have to cut costs and hence most of the staff there is inexperienced.. but this getting the order right is trivial thing... else they should bill people when the food is ready not 15 mins before that.

They have a pick up counter for online orders but there is no sign or anything... there was a guy who waited 10 mins behind us just to find out that his order was ready and waiting in the pick up section.

If you go to any other Zupas location you wont find these...