Thai Cottage

The moment you walk into this restaurant, you’re immediately impressed with how beautifully decorated this restaurant is and exactly how unique it looks. It’s definitely far from a cottage feel as the restaurant makes good use of space. (Trust me. It looks a whole lot bigger inside than it does from the outside.) There’s leveled seating as well as ground seating. The left side of the restaurant contains leveled seating whereas the right side as well as the front of the restaurant contains grounded seating. Whoever decorated this restaurant did a mighty fine job because I was definitely impressed with the decor, as well as choice of coloring used. (The blue wall at the back was striking.)

Unfortunately, that is about all that I can say about Thai Cottage when it comes to the positives since their customer service and food weren’t all that great.

The waitresses were dressed in Thai costumes. I believe it was a first for me to encounter waitresses at a Thai restaurant serving in Thai costumes. The costumes were pretty and allowed customers to easily figure out who was a waitress.

The waitresses were overly chatty and I don’t mean that they were chatting a lot with customers as I often saw them chatting with each other behind the counter where the cash register and drinks were. When I was there, there were only two waitresses working and they were often chit chatting with each other. Perhaps their customer service would have been better had they paid more attention to their job as a waitress and focusing on their customers as oppose to their own selves. I am not kidding when I say any time they found time to chit chat, they would chit chat away in Thai. It bugged me because when and where they were chit chatting, they weren’t able to keep an eye on all of their customers. They could only see customers that were dining at the front of the restaurant as their was a semi-wall behind them that blocked them from seeing customers dining in the back as well as some customers dining around the leveled seating area.

I probably wouldn’t have cared about them chit chatting so much if they could pay attention to their customers while chit chatting but it was something they couldn’t and didn’t do.

Before I go into the nitty gritty of their customer service, allow me to switch gears and talk about their food.

Their food, initially comes off delicious. That is, until you realize several bites later that the food you thought was scrumptious was loaded with MSG. Expect to drink a lot of water with your meal or expect to feel somewhat miserable after consuming excess MSG. Not a healthy place to eat whatsoever!

Now that I’ve talked about their food, allow me to get back to customer service. The bill comes and guess what? My mom and I note that we had been charged wrong. Our dishes had apparently been billed higher than the price set in the menu. We addressed this to the waiter and looked at their menu. We were right in that we were charged higher than we were supposed to be charged. The waitress told us that the price in the menu was “wrong” and that the price we were expecting to pay was for a special. That reply of hers threw us off because 1) we ordered the special and 2) if the price was “wrong”, why did she not tell us while we were ordering? My mom told the waitress that it was wrong for the restaurant to mislead customers by setting a price in the menu and charging a higher price on the customer’s bill. The waitress appeared dumbfounded. She said sorry but never apologized for not informing us beforehand that the prices on the menu were wrong. She ended up trying to switch stories by asking, “How was the food, though?” (Uh…bad, just like your customer service!)

We decided on letting this error of Thai Cottage go as we figured this would be our first and last visit to Thai Cottage. And indeed, it was our first and last visit ever to Thai Cottage. If you thought I was done on their bad customer service, I’m not done yet.

To make matters worse, the waitress ended up giving us the wrong amount of change. It wouldn’t be that much of a problem if she gave us more change than we were expecting, but she gave us less (a lot less) change than we were expecting. We had given her a $100 bill and she gave us the run around on the change. Since my mom had already encountered their hoopla on overcharging our meals, she chose to instantly check how much change we got back the moment the waitress returned to us with our change. I guess she had a feeling that something wasn’t right about the way they do business here and she was right alright. We addressed this to the waitress as soon as we could and received the additional change that we should have gotten the first time around.

Unethical, to say the least.

I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if there have been many customers (before and after us) that have been overcharged for their meals but are simply unaware of it because they don’t check their bill.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if there have been other customers who didn’t receive the full amount of change they were suppose to receive.

Thai Cottage’s customer service is horrid to say the least.

Transportation wise, the restaurant is easily accessible by bus (Howe). There’s also a parking lot available, however parking spots can easily get filled up as there are other businesses within the vicinity of Thai Cottage.

Keep in mind that this review of mine reflects my visit from about 4 years ago, so their customer service may actually be better and their food may contain less MSG now.

Note: This restaurant is called Thai Cottage and not Thai Palms.