Great American Restaurants 4+

Went to our favorite GAR (Carlisle) for our 52nd anniversary. Got there early (5:30pm) and was seated at a table in a draft by the door to the outside seating. Took forever to get drinks, bread came cold and hard (we were told it was probably left over from earlier in the day), then food arrived cold (chicken and shrimp n grits), so not supposed to be cold! Ordered dessert and our delightful server came back to tell us they were out of the waffle. Deal with it! Okay! Order apple pie and ice cream. Well, apple pie was all pastry, couldn’t find any apple in there! Asked the server for chocolate sauce, which he provided warm. That almost saved the day! If the restaurant had been busy I might have given them a pass in some of the issues, but it was less than a quarter filled. No reason for all these negatives! Carlisle management, get your act together or we’ll go elsewhere!

The decision to create this app is an example of 1. Business leadership being tired of having to pay the surcharge to an intermediary company, thought it would be fun to build their own app from the ground up, or both. The problem is that you don’t start a restaurant company to design apps. This app is a significant step back from those they had used previously with Best Buns, specifically Chow Now. It is cumbersome, it’s visuals are gaudy and poorly constructed, there are no API plug ins that allow it to integrate with Apple Pay or other payment exchange apps, nor does it slow you to use any of your external accounts (Apple, Facebook, Google) to create a profile, unlike the predecessor used. This app was likely a “great idea fairy” by company leadership who wanted the few extra cents or surcharge, but then gave zero funding to the actual design and development of the app and wondered why it’s an abject failure. You don’t build a restaurant business to design apps. So better off for your image to use a third party. In my opinion I give credit to the company and design team who had to build this app with basic requirements and little in funding, but the leadership who thought this was a great idea need for either be demoted or fired, so the technical IT team can get back to structuring your external interfaces for the betterment of the customer experience.

March 2022 update:

Placed an order today. Had to put in credit card info because there is no support for Apple Pay but the app does not leverage any of the built in capabilities of iOS to auto fill fields. Not often I run across an app or web site that can’t use auto fill.

Please hire a good iOS developer and update this app to modern standards. I’ve been told the to-go orders in many of the restaurants are doing great. Please give to-go customers the same great customer experience and attention to detail we get in store. This app does not reflect the same care.

Jan 2022
It get’s the basic task done but given the focus on to-go business for GAR this app should be much better. No support for Login with Apple No support for Apple Pay I had to reset my login as the new app did not recognize my old login but why not go all the way and add support for the most common identify providers like Apple and Google? In 2022 I should not have to create a new login to use an app and should not have to put credit card information into an app. I use too many other apps that support these features. At the beginning of the pandemic I could excuse a lack of those features but two years these should be standard features.