Texas Roadhouse — Restaurant in West Des Moines

Poor Seating Policy Implementation - Unreasonable Wait for Elderly Guest

Texas Roadhouse needs to reconsider how they handle seating policies, especially when it involves elderly or disabled guests.

Arrival and Wait Time: We arrived at 4:10 PM specifically before the dinner rush to secure seating for our party of 8 at the West Des Moines location on March 22nd, 2025. Despite arriving early to avoid crowds, we weren't seated until 5:20 PM - over an hour wait.

The Real Problem: Only 4 of us were present at 4:10 PM because we were trying to get a table before my 80+ year old wheelchair-bound grandmother arrived. She was waiting at home for confirmation that we had been seated before making the trip. The whole point was to prevent her from being in crowded or uncomfortable waiting conditions.

Inflexible Policy Creates More Problems: Texas Roadhouse refused to seat us until the entire party was present. This meant we had to call my grandmother and tell her to come anyway, forcing her to rush to get ready and travel to the restaurant. She arrived at 4:55 PM and still had to wait another 25 minutes to get seated, defeating the entire purpose of our early arrival and creating additional inconvenience for her.

ADA Accommodation Concerns: Their rigid policy likely violates the spirit of ADA requirements for reasonable accommodations. When a business knows a disabled guest is coming and family members request early seating to avoid accessibility issues, refusing this simple accommodation could be considered problematic. Making a wheelchair-bound elderly person wait in crowded conditions and rush to the restaurant when an easy solution exists raises serious accessibility concerns.

Poor Customer Service Logic: The policy makes no sense when you have elderly or disabled family members. We were trying to be considerate of both the restaurant and our grandmother's needs, but their rigid approach created exactly the situation we were trying to avoid while adding extra stress and inconvenience. Impact on Elderly Guest: Making an 80+ year old person in a wheelchair rush to the restaurant and then wait in crowded conditions when we could have had a table ready is simply poor customer service and shows a lack of understanding about accessibility needs.

Bottom Line: While the food may be decent, their inflexible seating policies show a lack of consideration for elderly and disabled guests and may violate ADA accommodation requirements. A simple accommodation would have solved everyone's problems, but instead they created unnecessary hardship and additional inconvenience for our family.

Rigid policies that ignore customer needs, accessibility concerns, and potentially ADA...

My assumption would be that this company does a significant percentage of sales in carry out business based on my extensive experience in restaurant consulting and management and the high end build out of both online ordering technology and square footage dedicated to this side of the business. This should be a huge advantage in the current environment we live in because of the pandemic. With that said it should be concerning for them that there are such poor reviews for this locations “to go” service. My experience will not be beneficial to the improvement of the overall score based on consumer reviews.

As a corporate business model the standards of execution should be elevated. Attention to detail by the dedicated carry out associates working needs improvement along with their face to face interaction with guests. While my food tonight was well cooked and packaged well, missing condiments and additions to menu items that are offered through the online ordering platform (especially those chosen at an up charge) have to be included in the order. Mine were not. Missing additional ranches, honey mustard, sour cream, and bacon on salads. The portion control with the condiments that were actually included was poor as well. Some containers filled and others literally had so little in them it was completely pointless and a waste of container cost. Handing someone a bag and walking away so fast a word could not be said is not the level of customer service I expected and honestly should have tipped me off to dig through my order for accuracy before getting all the way home to discover the inconsistencies between what was on the ticket vs in the bag.

Every dine in experience I have had with Texas Roadhouse has been exceptional and moving forward I will stick to that as it is obvious that the carry out side of things...

Honestly worst experience I have ever had, husband and I went there for a nice dinner. First off the whole online waitlist thing now is a joke, Second husband ordered apps for us the combo app platter said no bacon on the potato skins, because we don’t eat bacon. It was not asked it this was an allergy or religious reason just ok no bacon no problem. Now that normally wouldn’t be an issue if it actually came out the first try without bacon but nope. Had bacon on it, then the server told my husband to remove the potato skins with the bacon off the combo plate and onto a nearby side plate. You’ve got to be joking, we don’t eat bacon for religious reasons, so you are asking a person to touch the bacon, what if he was allergic not just religious or just don’t like bacon? You want him to touch it? Anyways then they bring out the potato skins, see pic below for reference. These greasy potato slivers with melted cheese are a crock. Then we order food whatever move on things happen, husband orders chicken fried steak and I get a filet. Food comes out husband has weird vibe with the country gravy, says no way that’s bacon. There it is again, after the waitress had a discussion with him about what gravy to put on this country fried steak, no mention of bacon but you know we said no bacon and already went thru all of that, the being grossed out at that point he changes it to a cheeseburger. We wait I’ve already finished my almost rare medium rare steak and he’s pissed. Then the cheeseburger comes out, good he can eat. Two bites in this supposed to be medium well burger is rare in the middle. You have to be Joking. Paid 70$ for basically one person to eat because my husband barely touched a bit of his food and we left worst experience ever. Won’t...