Black Rock Coffee Bar — Restaurant in Washington

UPDATE: Unfortunately, I have to modify my review from 5-stars to 2-stars. This business has gone down hill like a semi who lost it brakes. What was once one of the best Back Rock (BR) locations on the Washington side, has turned into probably one of the worst ones.

I am not sure what happened behind the scenes in the past year (change in ownership, maybe?), But this location started having problems. To name a few, and not write doctoral thesis, 1) They have consistently run out of essentially items to make their products/drinks. This has resulted in the (shift?) manager to run to the store to purchase replacement ingredients or, which happens the most, not have any of the ingredients. We're talking major essentially ingredients for multiple products/drinks. And it's not limited to one or two instances over two days here. We're talking about consistently over the course of months of visits. 2) Parking started to become absolutely bonkers. Which made the drive-thru line insanely long. On a weekly basis, I witnessed cars pull into the parking lot, not find a spot, see that the drive-thru line was out to the road, turn around and leave. On any given morning, for which I was inside for an hour or so, I would witness this patterns well over half a dozen times. That's a ton of lost revenue. This also happened to me as well when I would see the lot full and no way to safely wait in my car on the road for the drive-thru. When this would happen to me personally, I would usually continue on driving down the road to Starbucks. What made this situation exponentially worse, was that there would be at least four Baristas inside working. With limited parking to begin with, the Baristas took up essentially customer and business parking. It appeared the owner never sought to work with the hotel next door to have his/her employees park there. To his/her credit, the owner did end up buying the adjacent empty land and putting in addition parking. However, one can tell it was done cheaply further evident by the fact that it's a gravel lot and not well laid out. In the end, this alleviated some of the parking situation, however upon my most recent visit every single parking space was full; both the original paved parking lot and the additional gravel parking lot. People simply resorted to parking wherever they could in the gravel parking lot, even though it was full.

I said I wasn't going to do a thesis and so I won't go into the other details of how this business has declined so much, though some of it includes the quality of the products/drinks and the service from employees.

Needless to say, something big internally happened to this specific location which made it go from being one of the best in the area to easily one of the worst. While I have a friend who works for the corporate office, I've been hesitant to talk to them about the problems. It's really a local franchise owner problem and I'm not sure what's going on with them. If the franchise owner or corporate reads this review, you really need to reevaluate what's going on at this specific location.

Because I think BR overall is a good brand and generally provides great products, I'm giving 2-stars and not 1-star, but that's only out of generosity.

ORIGINAL: This Black Rock Coffee always has welcoming, cheerful, smiling staff. They take the time to talk to you and get to know you. I have yet to have a bad experience with this location, which I visit at least once or twice a week.

Overall, it is one of the better locations of this great local coffee chain. Can't...

I usually go to this location at least once or twice a week because I’m a nursing student at WSU. But yesterday will be my last time. At around 8:00 AM I ordered a medium caramel Blondie under the student discount. I got to my first class of the day and started drinking my coffee and immediately got sick.

Throughout my first two hour class, I vomited multiple times and had unpleasantries out the other end as well. I really couldn’t figure out what was wrong and just decided to toss my coffee. As I went to take the lid off and pour my drink in the bathroom sink, I came across a piece of plastic with black residue hanging from the bottom.

I showed my fellow classmates and we were all disgusted. I took my coffee back to Black Rock and showed the shift lead and although she was somewhat apologetic there wasn’t anything that was really done. She promised me the store manager Evan would be calling me within a couple of hours yet it’s the next day and nothing.

I spent hours at Kaiser urgent care yesterday and last night vomiting with liquid stool and pumped with medicine just to keep me hydrated. I’ve had a fever for hours and now have a lovely medical bill I did not plan on having. I’m now sick in bed with finals week in school coming up and I’m exhausted and upset. Yet Evan and this is establishment don’t care about the health and well-being of...

I have been coming here for the past almost 2 years, and as of recently my experience has been poor every time I order via DoorDash, or drive thru. They don’t label anything and when I confronted them about labeling, they told me I needed to request them being labeled… why can’t you just label it? Today, however, I went their drive thru and ordered 2 drinks a chiller and a fuel. I confirmed 4x what drinks it was and customizations, 4x! The once I paid and received my drinks, first the chiller, then the fuel- in which it was the wrong flavors (I’m pretty sure they have my drink to the vehicle in front of me), the “correct” drink was then given to me; there was barely any ice present in the drink and the cup was sticky, once I got to my destination I took a sip and believe it or not… it was the wrong flavors!!! The chiller I received was also made incorrectly. I have visited many black rocks and this location needs some serious help on getting orders made correctly. Another detail I forgot to mention is that this location was not slammed or busy, and gave a hefty tip for coffee. I will not be returning to this location any time soon. Which is very unfortunate because it’s the closest to my employer. Hope they can figure...