Bon Appetit Management Co

Jesus Christ, where do I start? I am a student at USF on the schools meal plan, which means I eat Bön Appetit’s food for every meal, and i can say that I am in awe of how terrible of a service they provide. I have never seen people so committed to not giving a s**t about their jobs more than those working at bon Appetit. Every time you order food it seems like the person at the register has no idea what they are supposed to be doing. Often times, the same person who was preparing your food is the same one swiping your card, so when they hand you back your card you have a nice layer of chicken grease on it due to there inability to take off their glove. I’m pretty sure that most of the people working there have no prior experience working with food because everyone is doing such a half ass job. When you order pizza and a side salad, they first cut the pizza with office scissors, then promptly plop the dressing drenched salad on top of your pizza and close the top of the container, which forces you to later eat your way through your salad to reach your now dressing covered mediocre pizza.
Bön Appetit claims to have all natural fresh ingredients, but i can’t say I see a difference. The quality of the food is mediocere at best and it’s extremely overpriced for what your getting. San Francisco has so many great restaurants (many with similar pricing) so it feels like your being robbed having to eat from the the pig trough of a selection that is the market café. Often times, the chicken in the burritos is largely made up of fat and cartilage, the beef nears the texture of mashed potatoes, and the rice is almost never all the way cooked. If your sitting there reading this review thinking «it can’t be that bad» you may be somewhat right. The salad bar has a nice selection, and the pre-​made sandwiches are edible as well, but living off a diet of salad and ham sandwiches gets old pretty fast. Finding something suitable to eat is even more difficult on the weekends because they have about half the selection and even less staff. The lines during the weekdays get bad enough due to their inability to work efficiently, but during the weekend… dear god.
The fact that a company so poorly run as bon Appetit has a monopoly on all the food sold at USF is extremely frustrating. I think I might just go on the ramen diet for the rest of the year.

This is for Bön Appetit as a whole company but most the Carlsbad location. The company is a joke. They preach local and sustainable ingredients, however they hardly use any of them. The use frozen Tyson chicken, Sysco brand fries, the cheapest dressing and vegetables they can find. I spent the last 4 years working for them what a f-​ed up company. Most unit manager are good. Mine was a joke. And the district manager are full of bs. I feel sorry for anyone who has to work with the one I had. He lied to the staff and the client all the time. He was all around a piece of trash. The vp and hr department were good but loosing there soul. Anyone thinking about using them find someone knew. There more about profit and apperance than standing by the values. I

The Bön Appetit food is sometimes good and sometimes not that great (as in bleh). The same goes for the Bön Appetit workers. Some are friendly while some are douche bags. I have been to several cafes (ex: Charlie’s, Truxx, and Stock Market) and the dishwasher/​utility men (not all, but a few in particular) can be real jerks. Working in a hospitality/​kitchen field, their attitude needs a lot of improving and better manners. So overall, it’s okay, but not that great that I would go the extra mile to eat food here.

For the past four years, I’ve suffered through plate after pâté of Bön Appetit cafeteria food in several of their Silicon Valley locations. You know the kind of food you get college dorms? This is pretty much the same stuff, scooped and slopped on your plate, and charged an arm and a leg for. Sure, it’s convenient, but at what cost?
My biggest complaint with the food at Bön Appetite is that it’s missing the most essential ingredient of all – love. Whether it’s a sad wheel of a quesedilla filled with low-​grade cheese, slathered with soggy beans, or any filet of chicken or pork, dry, and flavorless, sitting in a metallic bin for hours before arriving on your plate, there’s no pride, no visible effort by any of the chefs to make the food taste better.
But hey, when you have prime, high-​traffic locations (or more accurately, when you can get rich serving shitty food), why bother putting in the effort?

Another USF student here — representing Student and Faculty general disdain for Bön Appetit.
The contract with USF offers Boner ApeTit a monopoly over the school’s food. Their exploitative card charge and pricing process is in direct conflict with USF’s Jesuit principles of social justice.
(Examples abound: $ 1 extra for coffee at law school campus, average price for meal on campus is greater than or equal to high-​quality local restaurants, and please see previous reviews)
The only relationship that makes any sense is if Boner ApeTit offers some large profit or lucrative kick-​back to whomever is in control over on-​campus dining.
This relationship prevents fundraising, acceptable quality of food, market price value of food, and student run projects from existing on campus.
If you live on campus please venture elsewhere for food. This city has so much diversity and quality to offer in food and your dependence on on-​campus dining prevents you from this realization.

Bön Appetit manages the University of San Francisco’s cafeteria and caters USF’s on-​campus events. Bön Appetit is grossly overpriced. On campus, they charge $ 4 for a single box of mac and cheese. This same box can be purchased at Safeway (which has also been accused of being overpriced) for less than a dollar. I once purchased a chicken breast that still had a feather shaft in it. It looks as gross as it sounds. This was my grossest experience, but the food in general was gross. And the people who worked for Bön Appetit were, in general, mean (not the servers or cashiers, who have always been friendly to me, but the managers). I got yelled at once by a manager and I’ve heard stories about the rudeness other managers from those who were employed by Bön Appetit. Also, I have a friend who was in a club that wanted to have a fund raiser on the USF campus. The club wanted to sell In N Out burgers on campus, but due to USF’s contract with Bön Appetit, the students were forbidden from doing so. That may not sound so bad, but the club was trying to raise money for a volunteer trip to another country to work with children. And to think that clubs can’t sell *food* on a college campus for a *fundraiser* to do *good works* because the school has a contract with some stupid money –hungry company is just absurd. And very wrong.

Bön Appetit caters the food services for mostly all Santa Clara University events and serves food in our cafeteria at the Benson Center. They’re OK and serve a variety of different foods, but they kind of charge more than you’d expect to pay for their food somewhere else.
Kudos to the Engineering events that I had to help out with for work and not being carded by the Bön Appetit guys working the beer ice buckets back when I was 18 – 20. Getting buzzed with your bosses and co-​workers on-​campus was always more fun than actually working.

Wedding reception at De Young, Catered by Bön Appetit: Not a good experience for wedding vendors.
As a «wedding vendor,» I come second, after guests. But, my job, photographer, runs best if I eat when the bride and groom eat, and then am available when the bride and groom are schmoozing with guests who are still sitting at their tables.
Often, the dinner break is the first moment I get to relax and eat after five or more hours of photography and driving.
But Bön Appetit at the De Young Museum (don’t have your wedding reception at the De Young) treated me not as a vendor, but as a notch above party crasher and a notch below human.
The 120 guests had been eating for maybe half an hour when the De Young coordinator told me I could eat after the guests were all served. Then the Bön Appetit catering manager told me that there was no food for the photographer because the client hadn’t ordered vendor meals, «but I could scrape together some mac and cheese, left over from what we fed the kids.»
Either leave the premises to buy my own dinner, or go to my client, «the caterer wants to give me mac and cheese.»
It turns out that my client had ordered six extra meals — enough for every vendor, even one who wasn’t there. And they were to be identical to what the guests got! So she had to interrupt her meal to tell the catering manager to feed us.
The client should NEVER, EVER, EVER have to speak to one vendor on behalf of another vendor — the workers are there to make the clients’ day magical and perfect!
Ten minutes later the caterer delivers a box (like a box lunch at a picnic) and a plastic knife and fork. I open the box and saw a hunk of filet mignon, and a puddle of mashed sweet potatoes. No plate, no drink. «I’ll bring you a glass of water,» he said. Did I mention: No table and chair for eating — just sit on the bench and have a picnic of poorly prepared filet that can’t be cut with the plastic «knife.» (Filet as finger food!!)
(Poorly prepared filet — I couldn’t finish it.)
Ultimately, when I had almost finished the boxed food I had to — unbelievable — go to a guest table, ask for two unused glasses, and then grab a pitcher of water from the server station.
Big-​city caterers don’t treat the vendors as well as caterers in the rest of the Bay Area. But to condescend, lie to us, «mac and cheese» then feed us WITHOUT PLATES, without drinks, with a long delay, is passive-​aggressive and counter-​productive to our collective job of creating a wonderful experience for the couple and their family.
The topper to the caterer’s disrespect — when I am done eating, he walks by to give me a bottle of water, «I was able to scare up some water.»
Problems with wedding receptions at the De Young for guests and bridal party.
1) If you park in garage, entry from garage to the museum will be closed to wedding guests. Also, lot may close before event is over!
2) If you arrive early, you may have to wait outside in the cold SF evening
3) The view from the Tower — cocktail hour and dancing: most SF wedding venues having better views than this one. Plus, the outer shell of the tower drops so low that it obscures most of the view above the horizon. Maybe that’s why the view remains insipid.
Summary: The museum design and personnel are not suitable for wedding. You should select a location that is wedding-​friendly. The disadvantages of the De Young:
— Parking and signage not wedding friendly
— Clumsy pedestrian flow for guests
— Staff not wedding-​oriented
— Staff annoyance that they have to deal with wedding
— Tower view does not impress SF Visitors, let alone Bay Area natives
— The magnificence, audacity and grandeur of the DY Museum don’t translate into a good wedding venue.

Bön Appetit catered my wedding at the Legion of Honor. They are the house caterer there and we decided to go with them because we wouldn’t have to buy out their liquor license, then they would be using their own kitchens instead of cooking in tents outside and they promote sustainable, local and organic food choices. My fiancée and I wanted a different kind of reception from the usual sit down, eat your salad, eat your main, now listen to speeches kind of reception. We asked Bön Appetit if we could do several food stations full of fun comfort foods like sliders, grilled cheese sandwiches etc. and they were more than accomodating. We even requested mini Philly cheesesteaks as an homage to my husband’s college days in Philadelphia. They weren’t Pat’s cheesesteaks but they were awfully good! They made the whole process really easy and listened to what I wanted before coming back with the perfect menu for me. I also loved that everything was organic and locally sourced. And more importantly everything was YUMMY. They also took care of all the linens, chairs, tables etc and everything turned out exactly the way I wanted it!