First Watch

Our waitress messed up my order several times. I ordered the crab avocado toast on gluten free bread. The first order arrived without the crab. The second order arrived with crab, but on regular bread. The third attempt was the exact same plate as the second. The fourth attempt was on gf bread, but with scrambled eggs, not the easy over eggs that I had ordered. I took the last one as everybody else in our family was done eating. Our waitress made no attempt to make this right. To top it off, they rang up the wrong ticket and charged our son for a much larger ticket. Our son had to wait in line for 30 minutes to get it fixed. I was very disappointed with First Watch for Mother's Day brunch.

First Watch is usually one of the best brunch places in the KC metro, especially for people like me with food allergies or restricted diets. The local chain, as a whole, has been one of the safest, most reliable for me to eat at for 10 years But the Westport location was never my favorite. I just visited again with friends after several years. They've completely remodeled and clearly put a lot of effort into making the location nicer, but where it was lacking on this visit was the food. We had three orders of scrambled eggs. All three were runny and surprisingly small. They said we each got three eggs, but that was hard to believe. My sausage was slightly undercooked, while my country potatoes were both slightly underdone and slightly burnt (cooked too hot, too fast). It was a packed house and it seemed like they were too swamped and/or understaffed to maintain their best quality. The worst part was that I ordered a gluten-free meal and was brought the regular version with toast on top. Since I have celiac, I can't have any gluten at all, and had to send the whole meal back (which I hate to do!) The wait staff handled the mistake well, took back the contaminated meal, and brought me a new, gluten-free one. But the fact that my new meal had the same quality issues as those of my friends tells me it wasn't just a one-time problem. I hope management continues their obvious efforts to improve, especially food preparation, training their wait staff in handling food allergies properly, and hiring enough staff.