Cielo Restaurant, Benoni - Restaurant reviews (2024)

(3/5)

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Nice place to be

Warm Beer, extremely slow services sticky menus, building and tables tacky and old. Not as waterfront as pictures indicate - across a narrow strip of water from a loud highway. We didn't bother waiting.
More suitable for teenage beach party, such a waste.

Our company was meant to have their year end function in December 2019. Due to continuous rains on a daily basis, we ended up having our company function on the 31st January 2020. Our function was booked from 12h00 - 18h00 with lunch needing to be served from 12h30. Our events manager Matthew totally stuffed up our entire function. He told the kitchen our lunch needed to be served at 17h00. Our staff worked a half day and was starving by the time they got to the event as there was no lunch ready to be served. Our welcome drinks (sangria) was not ready on arrival as promised. This was supposed to be ready at 12h00 and it eventually arrived at 13h30. There were no non-alcoholic welcome drink options catered for. We specifically as for 'NO HARD LIQUOR' to be served to staff but this was at the bar. We had to ask them to take this away but they still served our staff alcohol inside the bar area of Cielo restaurant. We had a token system for drinks and this was ignored. Our lunch was served in drips and drabs thereafter because our food was not ready and the kitchen was running mad at this time. We eventually got served lunch at 14h45...at least 2 stations was open for service whilst the rest was still on their way. We were charged R480 for 8 food stations. This was a joke! the fish station was just a potjie pot of mild fish curry for 130 guests. The pasta station only catered for 1 pasta, ice cream station only served vanilla ice-cream with chocolate sauce. This was served at 17h00 by the way after I had to ask about 7 times. Our business owners, MD and directors from Cape Town flew in especially for this event. I was so embarrassed because they didn't even get to eat and enjoy the festivities because as the food eventually got out then had to get back to the airport to catch a flight back to Cape Town. We provided the venue with a list of the beers, ciders and wines we would like to have at the bar. Our business owner drinks Stella Artois. After making 3 trips to the venue and dozens of emails later, none of our requests was adhered to. In fact our emails was ignored. We had to make visits to the venue just to ensure that our requests was taken into consideration. This should have been the warning signs already and perhaps we should have bailed then as this was a clear indiction of the pathetic service to follow. But 2 of the 3 times we met with the business owner Elvis himself who assured us that our function was in good hands so we took a chance...but never again! The toilet facilities was terrible. The toilet doors locks was broken and couldn't lock, there was no toilet paper in the toilets and it wasn't cleaned. I asked Nosipho, Matt and the Operations manager to clean the toilets on 3 separate occasions and not of them bothered to listen to us. We had to constantly follow up on everything from the dirty floors, & tables, welcome drinks, drinks at the bar, toilets facilities and cleanliness, food being served, bringing out the rest of the food stations, bring out the ice cream station, do not serve our staff hard liquor at the inside bar and even waiting for the bill.Its such a pity, because the venue is beautiful but the quality of service, food and cleanliness of the facilities is pathetic. It's not worth spending money on such a venue. It did not feel like a party at all for me as I constantly had to chase up on everyone to get things done. I sent the owner Elvis an email after our function highlighting all of our concerns addressed above and he didn't even bother to reply to my email. This venue and our experience does not even deserve a 1 star rating but for the purposes of needing to post this review I had to oblige to a 1 star rating.

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