Little Dipper Fondue — Restaurant in Wilmington

Horrible experience! My husband and I came here last year and loved it and couldn't wait to bring the whole family. We live over 2 hrs away and drove the distance yesterday just to come here. I booked our reservation over a month ago and we had 10 ppl totaI including 4 children. I called a week in advance to find out about possible kid options as the online menu had none and was told about their grilled cheese option... PERFECT! When we got there I noticed that the pricing of the menu had drastically increased from our 1st visit last year but I wanted my family to experience it so we came anyway. I was upfront with our server from the beginning and explained that we were trying to avoid paying the extravagant price for the full 4 course meal because some in our party wanted to forego the appetizer option and others the soup/salad option so as to save money. It was also my mom's 65th bday and I personally wanted to be able to treat everyone at our table to the chocolate fondue dessert option at the end. All in all, we were there a total of nearly 3 1/2 hours!! Our reservation was at 4:30 and we weren't able to leave until almost 8pm with a 2 hour drive to get back home. It took 45 min just for the appetizer to come out. Wait time was ridiculous for the entrees to arrive considering you still have to cook everything yourself once you get it. The meat options we had were bland with no flavor at all. They waited til all of the fondue pots were put down on the table before announcing all of the kids grilled cheese sandwiches were just now on the grill. It was 30 min later before the children got to eat. We were letting them eat off of our plates because they were starving by this point. The sandwiches came out 1 by 1 and as hungry as they were, they didn't even want to eat them because they were cooked with large chunks of garlic right in the middle of all the cheese. Gross! Didn't taste good in the slightest! Then it came time for dessert. Remember how I mentioned that I was upfront with our server at the beginning about trying to go the cheaper route....well it was at this point that we realized that because we did that, we ended up going the more expensive route because everything was rung up a la carte which costs more per person. The menu didn't clearly explain this at all and neither did our server. It really wouldn't have been difficult for her to take an extra few minutes to better explain this to us and it would have spoken VOLUMES! Skip ahead to the bill. This was the icing on the cake. It took every fiber of my being not to ask for a manager the entire time during our dinner because again it was my mom's bday, we drove so far to get there, it wasn't easy to get everyone together for this event and I truly DID NOT want to cause an issue. However when our bill came, as much as I knew it might be, it ended up being even more because of 2 other oversights on the menu that were not explained including a 20% gratuity that the menu stated "may be added to parties of 6 or more." As you can imagine the tip portion was outlandish considering the experience we had had. I finally discreetly asked for a manager at the end and explained what we had been through while asking questions to better understand things. She was very rude, curt, and completely unhelpful saying there was nothing to be done because our food had been eaten. OF COURSE IT HAD BEEN EATEN! What were we expected to do after sitting there for over 3 hours! She finally took off the price of the grilled cheese sandwiches saying she shouldn't even do that because she would get in trouble...really??? So I paid the bill while leaving off a portion of the tip which was still extremely generous in my opinion. What was supposed to be a fun family outing ended up being a nightmare. The kids were still hungry and antsy and loud by the time all was said and done. It was all we could do not to run out of there as fast as we could! Needless to say we will never go back and I DO NOT recommend this restaurant to anyone unless you have a party of 4 or less with...

Honestly had such a bad experience tonight with our dinner. Dined here for a friend's birthday, there were 7 of us for ladies' night. We had a reservation. Not many of us had dined here before, so when we sat, we were expecting a thorough introduction of how the food works after we told our server we were joining them for ladies' night. We asked him about how it worked to add protein options, which he did not know much about, so he had to ask someone for assistance, which is fine, but it seems like a question that would be asked a lot that he should have known the answer to. Anyways, we ended up ordering 2 cheeses, 2 chicken, and 1 shrimp. And some drinks. The first cheese for the first half of the table came out 10 minutes before the other half of the table got their food. And the cheese goes hard after a while, so it was awkward when part of us were eating our food and the other half was just watching. It is also a hard dish to share between different halves of the table, but we tried our best. The drinks also took a long time as well, but understandable since he said the bar was backed up. The cheese was yummy! 10 minutes later, the other cheese came out to the other side of the table. We then waited another 10 minutes on our protein to come out, and by then, the cheese was already gone, and the pieces that were left had hardened. Overall, weird timing on everything. THE BIGGEST concern that I had with our experience was when it came time to get the checks. He asked us if we were ready for our checks, and we said yes, so he brought out one check. We noticed he wrote in big black sharpie at the bottom, "Happy birthday! Thank you!," and he purposely wrote over the gratuity that was already included so that we wouldn't see it. We then asked him if he could split them for us and it took around 40-45 minutes for him to split them. I understand splitting checks can be difficult, but we had 7 people and we were all separate. We were also there for ladies night, so we didn't each have completely separate meals, as we were told it was $20 a person, and 3 of us got cocktails. However, if it is that big of a deal and that time consuming to split the checks then the restaurant should have a policy to not split checks over a certain amount of ways. Anyways, our final checks came out, and he took the time AGAIN to write in big black letters, "Thank you!" on EACH check to cover up the gratuity amount that was included. That just seems like it shouldn't be allowed??? We were expecting gratuity to be included anyways because it literally said that on the menu. But our server went out of his way and took extra long to write this on all of our checks when we had been waiting for almost an hour on him to split them all up!! And the customer copy/merchant copy didn't even say that a tip was included! It made it look like the additional charge was tax. Honestly ridiculous. And I get it, I work in the restaurant industry as a server as well, but I would never try to scam my table like that. Overall terrible experience.

in response to the manager's reply: thanks for reaching out, but not once was the table spoken to by management nor offered anything to help. the birthday girl was offered a free drink at the end of our meal while we were still waiting on our checks. it was going on hour 3 of us being there, a free drink wasn't going to make up for our terrible experience. we just...

This was by far the worst experience I’ve ever had at a restaurant. As a former bartender/server I tend to give a lot of leeway to small issues knowing how difficult things can be. But my terrible experience was unrelated to our poor server and boiled down to the fact that the new management/owners couldn’t care less about guests or their staff.

A group of 10 of us went out for my birthday and 1/2 our group did the full experience and the other half did the ladies night special of just cheese and chocolate. The food was ok, and we were having a good time. There were a few hiccups but nothing we would have held against the server.

Cut to the end of the night when it’s time to get our checks (9:15pm) we tell the server the way to split them and 15-20 minutes later she returns. 1/2 our bills had items on them that weren’t ours, every price we’d been told was incorrect, etc.. For 3 of us one of our checks was almost $400 after all the added on upcharges and items that weren’t ours, the correct price should been closer to $225. We told the server that there was a lot errors and she took them all back to fix it. In the end we didn’t leave until almost 11pm after having to go over to the closed bar area since otherwise we were being ignored. A man sat at the end during the whole ordeal who I assumed he was a customer finishing up his drink/meal but turns out her was a manager/owner and just watched us be upset and complain the entire time, he was too busy calculating the evenings sales to acknowledge us. Not once did management try to make any accommodations to help us, and only after US suggesting that we all just write down individually what we had did they get the checks somewhat figured out. In the end we were WAAAAY overcharged but we were exhausted and just wanted to leave. None of us will ever go back and will tell anyone and everyone we know not to put themselves through their nonsense either.

Also just want to add we reached out to the owner who basically said it was our fault because we asked them to split the check. AFTER the server asked us how to split the checks. If you can’t do that for whatever reason just let us know ahead of time and don’t ask if we’d like to.

In regards to the owners response I’m not going to argue. You can look at most other recent reviews since their takeover to see how poorly they’re managing the restaurant. Not a single person in my party was rude in anyway to anyone, let alone the server. She left in tears because she was stressed out and probably embarrassed to say she works there. The bartender was great and did what she could to apologize to us seeing as no one else was bothering to acknowledge us, besides to say at least we were missing the storm that was happening outside. And your husband served drinks to our table several times throughout the night now that you mention it. But good to know he doesn’t work there, guess you need all the free labor possible since you clearly won’t keep anyone around long running the restaurant like you do.

We had cash ready to give the server because we had no faith in her being tipped out properly at the end of the night seeing as no one is able to run a POS system. But since she left she wasn’t able to receive it.

Hopefully your’re able to take our awful experience and learn from it so you don’t do it to other guests in the future. We’ve definitely learned from our experience and will...