Joel's Grill and Sushi (also operate JJ Wasabi's) Mooresville

I love when a fOOdie reaches out about a restaurant experience.  Good or bad it's nice to hear that they are paying attention and sharing their experience.  It has been forever since I went to Joels.  My number one reason is that the sushi isn't all they claim it to be.  They use a machine to spread the rice on the nori, and in turn, their roles are thin and underwhelming.  Since I am an extreme lover of sushi - this is a deal breaker.

Please enjoy our first guest post about this very place.  Guess what?  Sushi plays a roll with them too (pun intended):

Worst customer service in Mooresville would be an understatement.  After waiting almost a year to go back and test this theory, we weren’t disappointed.  We arrived around 6:45 on a Saturday night and as expected, they were busy with their dinner rush. We were offered a high top table by the bar with no wait, coincidentally enough the same table we had the poor service at the year before but we thought we’d give it another shot. 

After about five minutes, a lady came by to get our drink order. We ordered a bottle of wine and two waters. She was back promptly with the drinks and said that Edgar would actually be our server for the evening.  We looked over the menu and decided to get crab Rangoon as our appetizer.  We were still waiting for Edgar to come to our table so we also had plenty of time to decide what our entrees would be as well.  After at least fifteen minutes, he finally came to our table. We ordered our appetizer and also gave our entrée order as well, since we weren’t sure when he would come back. 

We were over half way through our bottle of wine and finished with both waters and still hadn’t received our appetizer. So at this point, we had been waiting over 30 minutes, and then our entrees arrived at the table. We said that we never received our appetizer and Edgar said “Oh, ok I’ll go get it.” We let him know that we did not want it now and he walked away.  I had ordered a bento box, which is a sampling of pork gyoza, fried rice, shrimp tempura, and a less than $5 roll of sushi.  For my sushi, I ordered a Cali roll with no roe.  Well, it was covered in roe when it arrived and of course after the appetizer incident, Edgar was no where to be found. So, I started eating my other selections and then he finally showed back up.  We asked to have my sushi switched out to what I ordered and he took it away.  He brought back the new roll a few minutes later with no apologies, and the roll looked terrible. It was rolled so loosely that I had to eat it with a fork.  The cheap china buffet does a better job than that.  And it didn’t taste very good either. 

So, we were pretty fed up at this point and politely asked to speak to the manager. When he came over, my husband calmly explained our bad experiences last year and that we had waited that long to come back and then proceeded to discuss our night thus far.  The manager was only interested in what we wanted out of it, as if getting a free meal would make it all better. My husband told him that we didn’t want anything for free but just to make him aware of these poor experiences and that we would never be back again.  The manager simply said “ok.”  No sir, that is not ok. 

Joel’s Asian Grill and Sushi and JJ Wasabi’s in Mooresville, NC are owned by the same people and they both have offered less than terrible customer service.  We will never return to either one of these restaurants since they clearly don’t care about their customers.