I recently wrote a post about Zocalo located at 11th and Broadway in Denver.  Up till this last night I have been pretty happy but my meal there tonight was pretty bad.

Let me say first that as a person who has worked in restaurants I tend to be pretty forgiving.  Yet tonight was just sad.

I went with a freind for a meal at 5PM.  They were busy but we were happy to wait since they usually serve pretty good food.  Tonight though the service was slow, they brought one of the meals wrong, and the french fries were burnt and hard.  Not crunchy, just hard.

The worst though was that it took us almost a half an hour to get our check.  I’ve talked before about how important I think customer loyalty cards are in making customers return.  The loyalty cards that Zocalo uses are pretty simple.  You buy six meals and you get one for free.  The wait people sign the numbers from one to six until the card is filled.

In the past we had always had one credit for each meal that we bought.  Tonight I noticed that the waitress, even though we had bought two meals, had only marked one credit.  When I asked why she said that it was only one credit per card.  I explained that in the past it had been one credit per meal but she insisted that it was only one per card.

Needless to say my loyalty card isn’t going to get much use for a while.  I won’t write them off because I understand that even the best places can have a bad night.  But having this change after going through several loyalty cards where it was one credit per meal and the quality of the meal and service were much better it was aggravating and this loyalty card is going to the back of my wallet.