Recently over at Frontburner, they described a recent bad experience they had at Ozona when they went there to have lunch. That post spawned a deluge of e-mail messages from readers describing similar experiences. Apparently Ozona is not the place to go if you want good service.
Well, apparently a higher-up at the company that runs Ozona saw the post. He says he wants to hear all the complaints. He says he will rectify the problem. That is a quick and great response. Even though the Frontburner guys asked for the e-mail messages to stop, the Ozona Management guy wants all of them. He says he will read and reply to every single one.
Did you recently go to Ozona and have a bad experience with the service there? If so, send an e-mail to Skylar Bell, sbell@fordrestgrp.com.
Poor Skylar. I work at Ozona and know how it can get there. There are some problems with service, partly due to quality of people hired. A big part of the problem is not so much to do with the servers as the management. The management treats the servers very poorly (no breaks at all for 10-12 hour shifts which means no chance to eat, ridiculous schedules (leaving one night at 1am and having to be back at 7:30am), etc.) which creates an environment with a lot of extremely exhausted people trying to deal with a never ending crowd of customers. They are trying to solve the issues through changes in scheduling, as most of the issues occur during the periods of shift change (2-4pm). In my opinion, the restaurant grew too fast, and the kitchen and bar are unable to keep up with the amount of people that the restaurant can seat. So when your margarita takes too long, it’s usually because the bar is backed up, not because your server is being lazy. I and almost everyone else that works there are very hard workers, after all, we depend on tips, so the more tables we can make happy, the better it is for us.
I love the patio and the food’s pretty good and the drinks are cheap. Please come on by. But don’t necessarily assume that all the problems are issues with the server. Maybe management could treat us a little better and things would improve. Just a thought.
Comment by Jill — July 22, 2007 @ 2:45 am