Almost every chain restaurant is offering a soup and salad combo for lunch. Not to outdone, Chili’s hoped on that bandwagon several months ago offering bottomless soup and salads for $6.49. Chili’s has done one better than competitors by offering not only bottomless soup and salad but with chips and salsa as well.

Chili’s so-called bottomless deal comes with your choice of salad – regular or Caesar and choice of soup – Chicken Tortilla, Baked Potato or vegetable. You can substitute your soup with chili for an additional fee.

Unlimited soup, salad and chips and salsa? Sounds like a great deal right? It would be if you actually had an opportunity to place more than your initial order. I’ve now been to Chili’s 3 times and either myself or someone in our party ordered this deal and we got our greasy chips immediately but had to wait a ridiculously long amount of time for the soup and salad.

Now really, how hard is it to scoop out some soup into a bowl and throw some salad together? On my first experience, after both of us ordered the bottomless soup and salad combo, we waited and waited and waited for our soup and salad – our wait time was easily about 20+ minutes. When the soup and salad FINALLY did arrive is wasn’t very tasty. The soup was bland and the lettuce in the salad wasn’t as fresh as it should have been. I decided I wouldn’t be ordering this again at Chili’s.

I could have dismissed this as the kitchen was backed up, but it has now happened on 2 more visits. So either Chili’s idea behind their “bottomless” lunch is to make you wait so long you can’t possibly place another order (less cost for them), or they are just completely incompetent.

This happened just the other day with me and my coworkers yet again. So, I actually started timing them. We placed our order at 12:20, by 12:53 we still didn’t have our order. It was about another 10 minutes before we got our food. Um, isn’t the idea of the soup and salad that you get something quickly so you can be in and out on your lunch hour? It even says on their website that it is served up “quickly”

My coworker that ordered the soup / salad combo said that the lettuce was old and not crisp at all. Her baked potato soup was cold as well. She hardly touched her food. As we’d been gone from our office nearly an hour, me and my other coworker had to try and wolf down our food as best as we could. We then flagged down another server to tell our waiter to get us the check as ours was MIA.

Our server didn’t even inquire as to why my coworker had barely touched her food. Then, to top it all off, he tried to charge us for chips and salsa that were supposed to be free! Only after I brought it to his attention, did he remove it. Too bad Chili’s dropped the ball on this one. I’ll go down the road to have Rafferty’s soup and salad which isn’t bottomless, but certainly a whole lot better.

[caption id="attachment_2088" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="Proper Soup and Salad found at Rafferty\'s"][/caption]

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