This was a truly terrible experience. My wife and I ordered lunch from Chubby's. It was a large order of spaghetti with bread stick. The price was $16.99 with a hefty five dollar plus delivery charge through EatStreet. Including the tip, this disaster of a disappointing spaghetti mush cost us $26.
The quality of the food was horrific. I told my coworker that it reminded me of the ghastly spaghetti I was force-fed at a rural school district in Arizona when I was a child eating in the cafeteria.
It's hard to make bad spaghetti. Most of us can manage a reasonable spaghetti at home. Throw I n a handful of noodles, fry up some low-quality hamburger, and mix it with a little bit of red sauce. This is a no-brainer, something within the reach of the most college freshman cooking on a hot plate in their dorm room.
So when you order spaghetti at a restaurant, you expect something a little better. Maybe a few herbs for taste. If it's a meat sauce, you expect the to be thoroughly cooked into the red sauce, not chunky gobs of hamburger. If there are meatballs, you expect them to actually be shaped like a ball. You know, balls? Those round spherical things?
What you don't expect is something that looks like a brick of hamburger was fried and then chopped into little squares and topped with some red sauce with no cooking time.
And in terms of value, the reason spaghetti is enduringly popular with families is that it is one of the cheapest meals you can make. A little cheap hamburger, half a jar of Prego, and about $.13 worth of noodles will feed a family of three or four people.
So imagine my surprise when I opened this child sized portion that looked like a baby's foot inside Michael Jordan's basketball shoes. Small food, big box. Actually, the container itself was reasonable. One of those aluminum dishes you would expect from any pasta place. The problem was it was 20% full
And as mentioned, my seven-year-old niece makes better spaghetti. This was not $17 quality. And it was definitely not $17 quantity.
When I called the restaurant, the woman was very nice and polite. Whoever I talked to on the phone was professional, and I hope they treat her well at the restaurant. She certainly knew how to de-escalate an angry situation. However, she explained that they weigh their portions and that I clearly received a large portion and that the small one is sent in a much smaller container. I understand that it's her job to say so, but that's crazy.
I asked them to come pick the food back up and return my money. I bought this through a third-party online, and she said there's no way they could do that, although realistically yes that would have been possible. At that point I would've accepted any concession from them. I just wanted another human being to admit that it was a tiny spaghetti.
At any rate, I have now made sure to go out of my way and tell the story to numerous people who live nearby to let them know Chubbys is a rip off. My wife was so frustrated she almost cried. She's a fantastic cook, and the thought of spending $26 for three dollars worth of gross cold spaghetti ripped her heart out.
The experience was so bad that I literally signed up for a yelp account to post my first review. read more