What a complete waste of money and time!
I really wanted to enjoy my dinner at The Melting Pot. I had heard it was a pretty good place on a number of occasions from other people, and also from the guy on KLSX 97.1 that does the food show on the weekends. I was ready to fall in love with The Melting Pot. But The Melting Pot decided to slap me across the face and shit in my double boiler!
I called on Friday to make a reservation for Monday, not a problem they had a 7:30 PM spot open (not the 6:30 or 7 we wanted but that’s fine). We arrive at 6:45 and they say we can be seated when we want (we were still waiting on 2 from our party of 4 so we go the bar). We have a couple drinks at the bar and at 7:25 we go to be seated. They walk us through the entire building to the very back, we pass empty table after empty table as they lead us to the furthest back spot of the building (this is important as the night goes on). We decide to get the special they have that’s the 4 course meal, cheese, salad, meat, dessert, called The Big Night Out (basically $90 a couple). We order a couple of the Strawberry Basil Lemonade (come to find out they are $9.75! each!) which were really good but overpriced for only having some strawberry twist vodka, no other alcohol in them. After a couple minutes our cheese arrives (Mediterranean Cheese Fondue and Fiesta Cheese Fondue), the highlight of the night! The cheese was wonderful and honestly could of been a meal in it’s own. Next was the salad, very good caesar salad. Then everything started to go downhill…
Our meat was brought out and things were looking good. The waitress got our oil and broth ready for our table, she tells us quickly of all the cook times for each thing on our plate. It would probably benefit them to have list of cook times for people that get 6 types of meat that all have different cook times especially when they have two different fondue bowls to cook in that also cook things in different lengths of time! After running off all cooking times she leaves. We discuss among each other the various cook times and decide just to wing it. Everything is looking good over on our broth pot, but the pot with oil doesn’t seem to be bubbling up like it should if you are frying food. It continues to just sit there doing nothing as we wait for our waitress to come back. After about 10-15 minutes she comes back and after showing her the problem she proceeds to get a manager who fiddles with the pot and decides the heating element needs replaced. Another 5 minutes passes and they replace the heating element. Even though 20 minutes passes and the oil is cool they decide not to replace the oil. Since the oil wasn’t replaced we had to wait another 10 minutes till it was able to get to cooking temperature. While we are waiting to use the oil we go ahead and just use the single broth pot for a majority of our food. Well over 1 hour passes without much interaction with the waitress other than refills to my iced tea, she never asks the rest of the group if they want more drinks or water, they had to ask for water eventually. It’s 9:40 and she takes our dessert order. She drops off the chocolate and things to dip in it and leaves. We eat our dessert and sort of just sit there waiting for her to come back with the check. She comes by at around 10:00 and I ask for the check, 10 minutes pass by and she finally comes back with it. I place my payment in with the bill and 10 more minutes pass as we wait for her to take it. We finally are able to leave at 10:25. 3 Hours for dinner. No wonder they are always so booked! Not to mention there were lots of empty seats, but for whatever reason we were sat in the back but when each of our members went to the bathroom she was up front near the bar talking with the bar staff, no wonder she kept taking so long.
Last couple things. The cheese was great! The meat portion was pretty good, but nothing amazing. The dessert was ho-hum, for what you are paying the milk chocolate should have been something of quality but it wasn’t really that tasty, this coming from my wife who absolutely LOVES chocolate.
Service was just way to slow. No wonder they charge so much and are always booked, the wait staff isn’t that great.
I would have expected the manager to comp us some of our bill for the issue with the burner, especially since it took nearly 30 minutes for it to be fully resolved (but I’ll take blame on not bringing this up).
Lastly we used our Entertainment Card which is supposed to get you a discount. The discount was applied AFTER tax which is not correct. Discounts are to be applied before Tax, they cannot tax you for services, items that are discounted. This would be like the grocery store charging you all the tax on everything and then taking the coupons off.
I’d rather just get my own fondue set. Then I’m responsible for the service.
[xrr rating=2/5]
The Melting Pot Restaurant
2646 Dupont Dr
Irvine, CA 92612
(949) 955-3242
