CJ
Candy Johnson
6 days ago
I really do love leaving great reviews. I’m usually the person cheering on the food, the service, the atmosphere, the whole experience.
Unfortunately, today I get to review a restaurant where we never even made it to the tacos. 🌮
Around 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 11, we were dropping off our rental car nearby and were genuinely excited to try this place. We had been driving around Savannah doing tourist things all day, so before going inside, we sat down at one of the many empty outdoor tables for about 25 minutes, caught our breath, talked about our evening plans, and figured out what we wanted to order.
You know. Absolutely scandalous behavior.
When we finally went inside to order, my husband politely asked if he could throw away a little trash we had accumulated in the car.
The young man behind the counter told him no, we could not use their trash can.
Then came the cherry on top:
We were apparently “lucky” they had allowed us to sit outside because there were no other customers.
Well. Thank goodness the Empty Chair Enforcement Division showed us mercy. 😂
We just stood there for a second because surely we had misunderstood the tone. Nope.
So instead of ordering tacos, drinks, and potentially becoming regular customers at a place conveniently located near somewhere we frequent, we decided to take our apparently highly controversial trash, our wallets, and ourselves elsewhere.
Here’s the thing that really gets me.
We have been coming to Savannah every couple of months for about a year. We adore this city. We love it enough that we are seriously considering moving here. Savannah has earned its reputation for hospitality over and over again with us.
We have eaten, shopped, stayed, toured, wandered, drank cocktails, gotten lost, asked dumb tourist questions, and probably occupied hundreds of chairs around this city.
And somehow, in all those experiences, nobody has ever managed to make us feel quite as unwelcome as this gentleman did in under two minutes.
Maybe we got lucky the other 99 times.
Apparently our luck ran out at the taco shop.
The funny part is, we weren’t asking for anything extraordinary. We sat in empty chairs at an empty table before ordering and asked to throw away a little trash before spending money there.
That was apparently a bridge too far.
I can’t review the tacos because we never got that far.
But I can review the hospitality.
⭐ One star for protecting those empty chairs with the vigilance they clearly deserve.
I genuinely hope the next visitors who walk through the door are greeted with a little more kindness, because Savannah deserves better ambassadors than the one we encountered today.
EDIT AUGUST 12: The owner responded that we sat there for an hour eating a “gas station salad” and accused me of “preying on small businesses” and “infecting them with negativity.”
To be clear: we had NO food with us and ate nothing there. The debris was from an earlier lunch that had been sitting in the rental car we had just returned. We chose their tables because we intended to become paying customers. We were hot and tired. It’s Georgia in August.
If our sitting there was a problem, someone could have simply asked whether we planned to order or asked us to move. No one did. We walked inside intending to order, and the employee’s treatment changed our minds.
Then, after I posted this review about an experience I ACTUALLY had with their business, they left a blank one-star review on MY small business several states away, despite never being a customer or having any experience with my services.
So the accusation about “preying on small businesses” feels particularly ironic.
I reviewed my actual experience. They retaliated by reviewing a business they have never patronized because they didn’t like what I said.
I think that speaks for itself.