We placed our catering order early in the week. When I arrived at the restaurant to pick up our order, I noticed that the parking lot was completely empty as well as the restaurant. Several signs were posted on the doors regarding an "Outage" as I approached the building.
We had not heard from the restaurant regarding any kind of outage so I was immediately concerned that there would be an issue with our food especially since guests were planning to arrive at our house within 35-40 minutes for my birthday dinner. Once I was closer to the signs, I realized that the restaurant was out of certain meats due to a broken grill. We ordered chicken and barbacoa as our double meat for the catering order.
Once I was acknowledged in the restaurant as the catering order, another person from the back came to the counter to let me know that the grill was broken so they were not able to provide chicken. I was immediately frustrated and disappointed by this news because this was the first we had heard about an outage and we planned on serving this food in less than an hour. This was also my birthday dinner and chicken is my favorite meat to eat from Chipotle. A courtesy call from the restaurant letting us know this news in advance would have been appreciated and should have taken place. I was instantly put on the spot to make a decision about how to replace the meat knowing that guests would be coming to the house soon and we still needed to set everything up. I ended up just selecting another order of barbacoa due to some pork dietary restrictions with the guests that were coming.
The worker I spoke to opened the top box for me to review, but I could not see the very bottom of the box. She also helped me carry the boxes to my car. The boxes were completely flat during my transit home and I did not experience any issues with traffic that would have caused sudden movement to the contents. When I arrived home, the barbacoa broth had leaked out and completely covered the bottom of the box.
Our order was supposed to serve 15 people and we ended up having a few people cancel at the last minute due to illness. If the 15 people that we planned for had all attended, we would not have had enough meat to serve the guests. We also ran completely out of cheese so that serving portion seemed light for the amount of people we planned for. The box contained more than enough serving utensils and napkins though.
Overall, we were incredibly disappointed by this catering experience with the Circleville, Ohio restaurant. We have had other issues with them in the past for non-catering orders and do not plan on returning there again. The restaurant is normally dirty, there is no sense of urgency with customer service, and our orders are normally missing something or light on portions. I have used Chipotle catering through other locations for work functions and have been pleased with the service so most of this poor experience is unfortunately due to the restaurant location in this case. We were hesitant to use this restaurant for that reason, but decided to give them a chance to prove that the staff could handle this task. We knew that something would get messed up during this catering process, but not to this magnitude. If they were not able to satisfy the meat portion of this request and knew that in advance, we should have been notified especially since our order was well in advance of the grill incident. There was also no offer to make things right from a financial perspective in the restaurant. A catering order of this size is a significant investment to just be met with a half-hearted "sorry." read more