Chuck E Cheese's

Chuck E. Cheese is every kid's ideal night on the town! There's pizza, prizes, games to suit any age or ability and of course their famous mantra "Where A Kid Can Be A Kid!" translates into "Run don't walk, please yell louder and we dare you to just try to break our industrial strength toys!" hehe. While free to enter, food is a little on the pricey side for mass produced food, but we all love our kiddos, and do it for them and the great memories it leaves them with! Despite all this, this Chuck E. Cheeses left us with our first ever bad Chuck E's experience. It was a real shame.

I remember going to Chuck E's as a kid, and while this one is certain to please most kiddos thirst for excitement, it falls terribly short of the grand memories I have from my childhood. Heck, it falls short compared to most Chuck E's still in existence today! Luckily for them it's not my opinion that keeps us coming back, it's that of my son. This Chuck E's is much smaller and less equipped than many especially in the physical play structure dept, but all those things I could overlook were it not for their terrible (and I mean terrible!) inability to clean the empty dirty tables when guests leave in a timely manner, and their lack of professionalism. Allow me to explain.

I have spent nights here where literally hours have passed as my son plays and the tables around us just sit stagnant, dirty, plates of half eaten food and oily napkins galore. Food on the floor, people and kids stepping on half eaten pieces of pizza being tracked around the restaurant. Tonight the whole section has been filthy the entirety of our time here, so far two hours. Guests have to clean tables themselves if they wish to sit in this section! I've just watched one family do exactly that. It's crazy, and for that reason alone I gave it three stars. What happened when we left made me take it down to two. Video here: <a href="/redir?url=http%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FzCJxR8redNs&s=d51d37783e4e147a81571953dcf30daaa0a55b1a7474f8f7aeb26d3570eedf2b" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/zCJxR8re…</a>

To their credit, their pizza seems to come out cooked nicely, not overdone, and in their defense the salad bar looked fresh until someone tilted it into the melted ice it sat in and flooded the leaves with water, where it sat until I brought it to their attention. That is important, no? The bathrooms are always a disaster too but I kind if expect that from a place where flocks of children roam about wild and largely unsupervised. If they fix the cleanliness issues I would be happy to update my review to reflect one more star. At one point in the night, after nobody had come to take away empty pizza trays, dirty plates and such at our own table after dinner, I attempted to find a garbage and do it myself, not wanting to bother anyone. I absolutely could not find a single one! No wonder there was so much litter on the floors! The kids give up trying to find one! Perplexed, I went to the front counter to ask if they had a garbage I had missed.  They simply took my garbage I was holding, and explained how they have a compactor and like to sort everything themselves before putting garbage in, hence no garbages in the main restaurant or play area. Wow. That's a new one on me!

What really made an impression on me was what happened after I wrote this review, because I did write it while our son was playing, and had not yet left. When we left, it was about 15 minutes to close at 10:45pm. We got out to our car, it was raining, then we noticed our GPS wasn't on it's cradle as it usually is. Being new to the area, and having traveled from another town to get to this Chuck E's we really needed it to get home. My Husband suspected he may have left it on our seat in the booth, so he went to go inside and check for it. To his shock, the doors were already locked! It was only a few moments past when we had left, and it was not their closing time of 11pm yet. He sat there in the rain, patiently, waiting for someone to notice him, and while they did notice him, the manager inside gestured to the concerned employees to just ignore him! So, my Husband, flustered, came back to the van and got his cell phone, to call and explain why he needed to come in. The call was fruitless. Keep in mind at this point, I was looking up wondering why they weren't letting him in, and noted the time was only 10:53pm. Still 8 minutes to close. People were still inside, including other customers!  We had just spent a small fortune in there! Really? He snuck in as someone else left, despite them. We had to have our GPS to navigate home!

In conclusion, this Chuck E. Cheeses is a smaller less snazzy version of most but it's great to have one at all in this area. The food is consistently done as it should be, the salad bar usually well stocked and clean, but cleanliness in this location leaves much to be desired, in addition to their absolute lack of manners. Still, I don't expect much from a place like this, and my son loved it.

Although it's no Showbiz this Chuck E Cheese isn't terrible. They still have a robot band and a lot of old school games that most other locations got rid of when they changed from showbiz to CC. All in all i'd say this is probably the only CC that i'm willing to take my daughter to on a rainy day. It's not crowded and the servers and attendants really are nice. They even rounded up my daughters 58 tickets to 60 so she could get that fancy mouse fan that she had her eye on!