Attn Remington Grill: Change is Bad
Updated my Remington Grill post with new information and a response from the president.
I have bad luck with burger joints and its a shame because the juicy meaty goodness can’t be beat. Some may remember my cheeburger cheeburger experience. Well, last Friday Jen and I couldn’t decide on where to go to eat, all I knew was that I wanted french fries. It didn’t take long before we decided on an old reliable, Remington Grill in Morrisville, because every french fry lover knows that Remington Grill’s fresh cut bottomless french fries can’t be beat, or so I thought.
We called up Scoogle to see if he wanted to meet us there for his first Remington Gril experience and he couldn’t resist the lure of “Morrisville’s best french fries” as I had told him. We arrive at about 7pm and like everything in Morrisville on Friday night, it is pretty empty. We order our food, sit down, chat and as soon as my mouth starts watering from the smell of deep fried potato goodness, he calls our number. Yippy, Food is ready!
Jen picks it up from the window for us and brings it back to the table and my jaw drops. I can’t believe what I am seeing. “Remington Grill stopped using fresh french fries in favor of some frozen generic crap?” I gasped to my wife and Scoogle. “Say it ain’t so!” I repeated at least 3 times as if I was calling for Beetlejuice. Remington Grill had changed. To picture my disappointment, imagine a kid on Christmas morning expecting a shiny new remote control car, he see’s a box under the tree with his name on it and thinks “its about the size of a Tyco Bandit, IT HAS TO BE IT! YAY!” The poor boy opens the box only to find a turtleneck sweater knitted by his grandma that looks like it has 3 arms. Heart-broken, dreams shattered and ultimate disappointment. That is how I felt when I realized Remington Grill had betrayed me and every other french fry loving soul in Morrisville. I can only hope this epidemic of change has not spread to the Raleigh and Cary locations which I fear it has. But wait, there’s more…
It didn’t end with the french fry disappointment. Jen’s barbeque chicken sandwich didn’t have any BBQ sauce on it, it came on the side. Who in their right mind orders a BBQ sandwich w/o any sauce on it? No one, including her. If we wanted a chicken sandwich we could have gone to Chic-Fil-a. It was a minor mistake and easily forgiven, until we tasted the BBQ sauce. They even changed the BBQ sauce, what has the world come to?! The once vinegary, spicy, barbeque sauce now tasted like KC Masterpiece with a little bit of honey added for sweetness. While I like KC Masterpiece, this is just unacceptable from Remington Grill. But wait, there’s more…
So at this point, I feel bad for letting Scoogle down after getting his hopes up for Remington Grill but it got even worse when he saw Jen pouring the ketchup onto her not-fresh-cut-but-now-frozen french fries, it was almost like water. Apparently, Remington Grill had gone out to CostCo and got some cheap version of Heinz 57, pumped it into these red squirt bottles with 1 part ketchup, 2 parts water. Unacceptable, while I don’t like ketchup they have already butchered one of the 3 sanctities of Burger Joint-hood (Burgers, Fries, ketchup) by serving up some cheap Sam’s Club frozen french fries and now they mess with the ketchup (along with the BBQ sauce)?! Someone at Remington Grill needs some lashings.
While the burgers had remained unchanged, for now, the serving of the cheap french fries and poor quality ketchup and BBQ sauce left a bad taste in our mouth. Its hard to swallow when an old reliable favorite of ours turns into a cost cutting, more expensive version of McDonald’s. It is sad to say that we will no longer be visiting Remington Grill restaurants.
Good-bye fresh cut french fries, I’ll miss you!
*updated* - I completely forgot to mention they just about kicked us out at 8pm when the hours posted clearly say 9pm. At 745pm they cut off the music and TVs and when we left they immediately locked the doors behind us, not a very welcoming situation.
*update* - I just filled out their contact us form with the following. (They may still get a snail mail version too)
Just wanted to express my disappointment in our most recent and last visit to Remington Grill. Usually, my wife and I use Remington Grill as a standby when we want good food but don’t know where to go. To be more succinct then my blog post about the situation, the Fries were terrible cheap, formerly frozen, replacements for the fresh cut fries of old. The ketchup was unedible, it might as well had been water it was so watered down and the BBQ sauce had changed not for the better.
I completely forgot to mention they just about kicked us out at 8pm when the hours posted clearly say 9pm. At 745pm they cut off the music and TVs and when we left they immediately locked the doors behind us, not a very welcoming situation.
I just wanted to pass on our thoughts of disappointment of what we used to consider a very quality restaurant.
Feel free to contact me with any questions.
Thanks
Evan Roberts
Evan@EKR
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8 Responses to “Attn Remington Grill: Change is Bad”
Red Robin is where the fries are at! Yummy and bottomless, kind of like
*insert name of friend’s wife/gf/sister/etc*
http://www.remingtongrill.com/pages/morsville.html
NOTICE
This store is operating outside the requirements of Remington Grill standands by changing menu items, offering unapproved menu choices, not serving fresh cut fries, not offering free fry refills, and not accepting approved coupons. We are in the process of stopping this location from operating as a Remington Grill.
^thanks. I’m still pissed i wasted my money on this crap
They changed owners a few months back and it has gone rapidly down hill. I predict they will be out of business by the spring.
Good job on informing a corporation of what sounds like a bad franchise operation! If there were more people like you, the world would be a better place.
Evan,
Sorry you did not receive a reply earlier but we weren’t aware of your site or complaint. We just happened to come upon it while doing a Google search for Remington Grill.
We’re not sure being critical for not responding is fair. Complaints using our web site contact page are answered quickly and corrective action is taken or an explanation given.
Don’t know who forwarded our web site explanation, but it was posted to help disappointed customers understand.
You will not be surprised to hear that there were many complaints received about the Morrisville store following an ownership change in 2006.
We continually tried to force new owners into compliance with our required products and recipes. As your poor experience showed, we were unsuccessful. What you may not know, is that it is not easy to shut down a “rougue” store but it was finally accomplished.
What was discouraging about your comments was that you assumed that all Remington Grill locations had changed and they had not. All eight remaining locations were/are following the high quality standards Remington Grill is known for.
We hope this will encourage you to go back to any Remington Grill with confidence that you will not be disappointed.
And for your information, we will be opening a new Morrisville located at the corner of Davis Drive and McKimmon parkway in late spring 2008.
Sincerely,
David Harris
President/Owner
Remington Grill
[...] my previous post regarding Remington Grill I expressed my extreme disappoint in one of my preferred burger joints. I even went as far as [...]
I just came from Remington Grill on 309 Bickett Blvd., Louisburg, NC, where I was very disappointed by my order. I ordered two hotdogs, brunswick stew and a drink. The stew was luke warm and the hotdogs were made with one hotdog cut in half and each half put on a bun to make two hotdogs. When I questioned them about only having half a hotdog on each bun, I was told they run out of hotdogs and had to cut one in half to make two hotdogs. Since our order number was 19 and they were serving number 26 when we asked what happened to order 19, I can only surmise it must have been a rather difficult job to cut that hotdog in half in order to make a two hotdog order.