Applebee's Grill + Bar — Restaurant in Waterloo

Came here with a group of 8 people tonight. We were seated pretty quickly in the corner party booth. Our server was Ashley, a shorter girl with dark straight hair, shoulder length. She was nice, took our orders and brought out our drinks. However there were a few confusions right off the bat: One of my friends ordered a fuzzy navel and all she brought him was a shot of peach schnapps after he had already told her that a Fuzzy Navel (she asked) is peach schnapps with orange juice. She brought out the correct drink and only mixed up whose drinks belonged to who. She also didn't card those of us who were buying alcoholic beverages that were obviously in the 20-30 age range. Our food came out in a timely manner, but she also couldn't remember whose food was whose. It was really busy so we just gave her the benefit of the doubt.

At 11:30pm we were ready to pay and the restaurant was dead except for our group and a 2 top (couple at a table) that wasn't in her section. We asked for our tickets and then proceeded to wait literally 20 MINUTES if not longer to pay. She kept messing up our tickets and charged us for the peach schnapps shot that my friend sent back in addition to the Fuzzy Navel he ordered, and then also charged us for two orders of wings and nachos when we only got one of each. We sent her back 3 times with corrections before I finally asked to speak with the manager on duty: Shawn. This guy. He was polite but when I asked him if our server was new, he wouldn't answer my question and just said "Well it was pretty busy tonight", to which I responded "Okay. I used to work at the Applebee's in Cedar Falls, about 6 months ago. I know your training system and all I can tell you is that she was overwhelmed and should have had help instead of taking care of our party alone. The mistakes she made were elementary, and we've waited over 20 minutes for our tickets when we are the only table left. I just want to see her succeed and I think she could use some more training by shadowing someone or hosting again." He responded saying "Well she is one of our newer servers, I'll take care of your tickets." I assumed this meant he was going to be paying for our meals, but it didn't. He just gave us a discount. When our server came back, the tickets STILL weren't right but at that point we just told her to let us pay and we would split up the cost on our own outside at our cars.

Bottom line: Way too many mistakes that someone who is serving shouldn't be having. At Applebee's you start out as a host, and when you get good at that you get moved up to serving but you still shadow someone and have help until you are deemed stable enough to be on your own. I don't know if this girl had never worked a Saturday Night BOGO 1/2 Off Apps night, but there is no excuse for the issues with the bills we had at the end of the evening when we were her only table and she literally took forever and still didn't get the bills right. I also don't really remember her ever apologizing for her mistakes either and I never once saw her go ask anyone for help when she was struggling at the terminal with our bills. The manager should have taken our complaint more seriously as well but didn't seem to really care about it.

Good food, but not worth all of this trouble and I don't think we will be returning...

I have went to this location twice recently. If I had rated it after my first visit I would have given it a 5 star rating bit apparently this establishment vastly varies. Today we walked in right behind a group of 3. We both stood there for awhile just waiting to be greeted let alone seated. Once seated our first server started off well and got our drinks but when she came to take our order she was seated 2 more table s. We had 5 in our group, 6 was in the next, and 5 in the other. It was noon, so this should have been something they were prepared for but unfortunately no. Our server came to take out order. I had a question she didn't know the answer to. On my previous visit they catered to my diet by not adding certain things and asked her if it was possible to do again. She came off sounding like she didn't want to and said they couldn't until I told her they did just a few days ago on my last visit. She then said she would ask her manager who was just a few steps away. I paused waiting for her to ask. She said," oh you want me to ask right now. I said yes please it changes what I order trying to maintain politeness while quickly running out of patience because we drove from out of town to eat there because our town has had it's power of for five days now. The server grabs the Manager two tables over and asks. The manager said it would be inconvenient but if I insisted they could. The first time it seemed to be no problem. Finally we ordered and instead of our server putting our orders in right away she goes to the next table, gets them started, and then the next til we finally requested a new server. They then brought out the wrong appetizer. By time the food arrived I had decided to just make it a very long time before I returned. The edges of my chicken we're so we'll done it looked like chicken jerky. The top was dark brown. My daughter s chicken looked like the seasoning lid fell off and the other daughter said she was hungry but just couldn't eat and didn't wanna complain. We tipped well only because we understand the business but it would have been nice to have actually had service. 1 star was an extremely generous rating. At least the second server had a pleasant attitude but I wish the visit was more like the first. There's no reason for them not to have been prepared for 4 tables to show up inside 30min span of time...

On August 28th (2023) myself and my co-manager took our three new hires out to lunch for their first day of employment with our company and chose Applebee’s as it was close to our store and has a variety of meals. The meal was decent, but the service was extremely disappointing.

As soon as we walked in around 12:30 that afternoon, we saw almost an entire restaurant of empty tables. A female hostess wearing a bandanna greeted us 10 minutes after we arrived and asked us if a booth would be okay. As a group of 5 adults, there was no way we were going to fit in a booth. When we hesitated, she just said, “they are big booths”. My co-manager pointed out a table almost directly in front of us and asked if we could sit at one of those tables, to which she practically rolled her eyes and took us to the table.

We found our seats at the table and immediately had a waitress asking us if we were ready to order not even 2 minutes later, which we had yet to even open our menus. All of the silverware was thrown on top of a thin pile of napkins, which we found to be very unsanitary being out in the open and not wrapped in sets individually like you would commonly find at most restaurants.

We ordered appetizers, however they were delivered halfway through our meal due to the kitchen staff allegedly forgetting to put in the order for the appetizers. They did take half off the appetizers, which I do think they should not have charged us for them at all, but I did not say anything as we were just ready to leave at that point. Overall, the staff was not friendly and we rarely had anyone come check on our table.

This experience was overall disappointing, especially due to the fact that the restaurant was less than half full at lunch time, so you would think the service at the very least would have been decent. I wish we had chosen to go elsewhere to celebrate our new hires. This was my first and last time at this Applebee’s location and I will make sure to continue to patronize the Cedar Falls location...