The title speaks for itself. Domo 77 in Aurora, IL is the worst restaurant in the world. Here’s my horror story:

My wife and I decided to have a nice little dinner on Saturday night. We’ve been going full speed the last few weeks (months actually) and haven’t had a weekend to ourselves in a while. We’ve gone to the Domo 77 in Wheaton before and it’s been pretty good. So they opened a new one right down the road from us (closer than the Wheaton one). We made a reservation for 2 at 7:15 PM and made a date night.

We get there at about 5 after 7 and we have to wait for our table to be ready. While we are waiting, we notice that the wallpaper was already coming off of the walls. A place that’s open for a week shouldn’t already have the wallpaper coming off the wall. Our name gets called and we head towards our seats. The first thing we notice is that there is a strong draft coming from the ceiling.  We don’t really notice it right away because it’s kinda hot in the main area (which has 24 stations that are ALL full of people, so there are that many grills going at once).  The first thing that we do notice is our seats are right in front of where the carts for dishes and food come out. Now this is annoying as hell because every 20 seconds, a cart is going by rubbing against our coats and knocking into my wife’s purse.

We get our menus from the waitress and she lets us know that we have to share menus because they are running short.  They also have one of the menus copied and stapled together.  Pretty classy for a restaurant that averages $25 for dinner.   In Japanese steakhouses, they give you a hot towel to wipe off your hands.  In most places, they either hand you a towel using tongs or open the package halfway so you can take it out yourself.  Our waitress decided that it would be a good idea to put it on everyone’s plate.  That’s rather disgusting considering it was just thrown into a box and then heated up. 

Our waitress comes back after we’ve had a chance to look at the menus and we order our drinks.  I get a Coke and my wife orders a hot tea and water.  By this time, the other couple at our table stops one of the other waitresses to ask about the draft.  There is an A/C vent pointed directly at our table.  I haven’t really noticed it, but my wife makes a comment that it’s starting to get cold. 

Our drinks come and we order our food.   She brings the wrong drink to the father of the family of 3.

She gets to us and we get to order:  I order the Filet Mignon and Shrimp, with an appetizer of Tempura Shrimp and a Spicy Tuna Roll Sushi.  My wife orders the Filet Mignon and Shrimp and an appetizer of California Rolls.  After we order our food, a family of 3 next to us orders an appetizer of edamame.  For those of you who haven’t ever been to a Japanese steakhouse, edamame are soybeans.  They are pretty common at those types of restaurants.  After the father orders them, our waitress looks at them like they’ve just ordered a big pile of shit.  DUH!  We figured she was new, but please, at least figure out what’s on the menu. 

My wife was pretty thirsty and she finished her water quickly.  When we were ordering our food, she asked for another water.  Our waitress said okay, and went off.  We waited for a while and she didn’t come back with it. We couldn’t even find her.  She wasn’t in the kitchen (we could see into the kitchen from where we were sitting and were looking there frequently.  we had to be on the lookout for carts coming in and out.).  She came out with another table’s drinks, and didn’t even bring out my wife’s water.  She looks over at her and says “I didn’t forget your water”.

Our cook comes to the table and starts to do his thing.  I notice that because of the air coming from the A/C system, the smoke from the grill is blowing right in the faces of the family of 3.  After about 5 minutes, we move a seat over so that the little girl (probably 8-9 yrs old) can move to an area where there wasn’t smoke blowing in her face.

The waitress still hasn’t brought out the water, so my wife goes up to the hostess and asks for someone to bring out a water for her.  We get our California Rolls, but we are still waiting on the Tuna and the Tempura.  Note, that our cook has already served us the shrimp and some appetizery stuff.

One part of the show is where the cook lights a stack of sliced onion.  Because of the draft, he almost burns off the guy’s eyebrows.  The draft was blowing the flames from the top of the onion towards this guy.  Here’s what it looks like:

As you can see, when the flames come out of the top of the onion, it can get pretty big.  Imagine this coming towards you as you’re eating part of your meal.  He had to stop it from flaming before it melted the guy’s straw.

By this time, I’m wondering if we’re ever going to get the rest of our appetizers.  I stop eating because I really wanted to eat the appetizers because I didn’t want to take them home.  I say something to the cook and he grabs one of the hostesses to find out what’s going on with our food.  After waiting 5 minutes, I try a scoop of food.  It’s already very cold because of the A/C blowing on it.

I say something to our cook as he’s cleaning off the grill about how we haven’t gotten our appetizer.  He can’t believe it.  He motions for a manager to come over and see what’s going on.  She assures me that she’s going to take care of us.  After a couple of minutes, another waiter comes over and tells us that he’s helping out our waitress.  He says that the appetizer order got messed up and wanted to know if we still wanted it.  At this point, it was already 8:45, we’ve wasted enough time there.  I told them that I didn’t want it.

So we’re waiting for a while and the waitress comes over to us and says that her manager is taking care of our bill. We figured we’d get something for free or not have to pay for the meal at all.  We get the bill and she took off appetizers that we DIDN’T get and the tea that my wife ordered.  It was so nice of them to take off a $2 menu item for a night of shitty service.

My wife calls Domo 77 on Sunday because she’s still upset about what had happened.  She wanted to find out what can be done to rectify the situation.  She asks for a manager and Eddie takes the call.  He told my wife that he was the manager at the Aurora and at the Wheaton locations.  She begins to tell him about the horrible service that we received, however, she could not get a full sentence in without being interrupted.  He also tells her that if we wanted to have a nice, quiet dinner, that we shouldn’t have come at 7PM on a Saturday.

He then wanted a list of the problems that we had, so my wife starts to list out, one by one, each problem above.  After each one, he said, “Okay, next problem” sarcastically.  She got up to seven and she said that there shouldn’t have been that many problems.

She asked if he could listen while she just talked for a moment because he would interrupt every sentence.  As she spoke, he once again interrupted her.  She continued to speak and asked him again to just give he a chance to talk.  He ended up hanging up on her.   He hung up on her. 

So I’m putting the word out on the streets that Domo 77 in Aurora, IL has horrible customer service and if you want to enjoy your dinner, not to go on a Saturday night at 7PM.