California Pizza Kitchen - San Mateo

I stopped with family for lunch 4/8/24 at the Hillsdale location. Also ordered Chicken Tequila Fettuccine to take home....a delicious $14 dish I have had many times before. When i ate that evening I found the food tasteless. Besides cutting the chicken differently now and overcooking it, the dish was lacking an important ingredient mentioned on the menu: Red Onions.
Also the side little container of Parmesan cheese was absent.

I am crossing this this dish off my list of favs.

One of the hallmarks of the many CPK locations is consistency, at a fair price. Today was not one of those days. Our dining journey was off to a decent start with their complementary bread, White Corn Guacamole, and Spicy Buffalo Cauliflower. The only issue with those were the chips. It looks like they had given us the broken ones that you'd typically find at the bottom of the bag.

After that, it went downhill a bit. The Korean BBQ Steak Pizza was a major disappointment. In fact, we sent back of the 2 pizzas we had at the table. A member of our party ordered his without the sriracha-lime hot sauce. So, his pizza a pretty bland with tough pieces of meat. The other pizza came without the sauce as well, though we had not asked to have it taken out. After asking for a side of the sauce, that pizza was palatable. The Banh Mi Power Bowl was just ok.

Service was good. Javier got overwhelmed trying to handle our party of 7 and the other party of about 15 people. Thankfully, a team member came by at our request. She took our orders and checked on us frequently.

I don't expect fancy dining, but I do expect acceptable service. This is where the Hillsdale CPK fell severely short last week when we dined there.

We arrived and waited at the host stand for over 10 minutes before someone came to greet and seat us. It was a Wednesday night and it did not look very crowded. Worse, we couldn't even tell who the host was. Several employees were shuffling around, but no one was looking in our direction as the queue to be seated grew to 4 parties. Finally, someone came to seat us.

We were seated and then it took another almost 10 minutes before a server came to our table. We couldn't flag someone down because we didn't know who our server was. There was an older Latina server busting her butt taking care of about a dozen tables by herself. I wish we had her. There was another young girl who looked like she was the barkeep but was also taking care of 3 tables. It turns out the latter was our server. What was annoying to see was that she was taking her sweet ole time. No urgency. She was walking the speed you would strolling through the mall. She was helping tables one at a time. She would bring out what they needed and only then check other tables who had flagged her down, needing something. No evidence of multitasking.

Finally, she took our full order - we had waited so long we didn't want to wait for her to bring our drinks and then take our food order - and we proceeded to wait another 12 minutes until our drinks and an appetizer were brought to the table. Great, so we had drinks and some food but were missing silverware and plates. You would think that's a basic need and would be noticed by the server.

We waited another 8 and a half minutes until our main dishes were brought out. Another annoyance - she put in the wrong pizza order for our son. When a server takes an order WITHOUT writing anything down they are fully to blame for a mistaken dish. I later realized that since she didn't write anything down she did not read back our order for accuracy.

My son's correct pizza came out after another 10 minutes since they made the wrong one and they had to make it anew. We ate our food - at least that was good. Getting our check was another wait.

I saw two things wrong that night. One- there were only two servers in the front room. When there is something like 25 tables and bar seats, how can this restaurant staff only 2 servers? Is it a cost-saving decision? If that's the case, shame on the franchisees. Stop being cheap and staff properly - I used to come to this restaurant a lot before we had kids and the service was always fast and welcoming. Two, that server needs training and maybe shadow the older Latina server to learn how to hustle.

Figure it out, CPK. We noticed a patron who was waiting so long that she got up and left. I don't blame her. She was seated but no one came to their table for at least 8 minutes. If I didn't have hungry kids I would have done the same.

[See my attached screencap of my timer. Something told me to use the timer just to see how slow they'd be.]

3.5 for me -- average fast casual. It's been years since I've had CPK, but I remembered that their Thai chicken pizza is pretty good. We came here on New Year's Day since it was open and we were already at the mall.

Decent fast casual option if you're in the mood for things like pizza. Convenient location as parking in easy since there's lots of options nearby and you can shop around the mall before and after lunch. Staff was friendly and at least the women's bathroom was clean.

The Thai chicken pizza was good (not great, but still good). I felt like it could have used more toppings. It looked like the toppings were concentrated in the center, so we ended up with some deep long crusts. Also the toppings were kind of dry, so I'm not sure if they weren't fresh or maybe got overcooked.

We also ordered the children's cheesy pasta, which tasted good.

We were able to bring in our outside drinks like Philz and Jamba Juice, so that was convenient and helpful. There's a variety of seating options inside. As a family, we sat comfortably in one of the booths by the large window.

I had another great time at this place , the key lime pie is really good. I had it for breakfast I had this spicy avocado thing too, it was pretty good. The service is great here too. I'll be back for happy hour.

Excellent cedar plank salmon dish with corn succotash. Service was great and menu choices are excellent.

On this day we came in after lunch and it was empty. We had to wait for more than 7 mins to get seated even though there were a few employees walking around. That was NOT the problem, it was the service. The wait times were sooo long I could not get a refill of my water. The waiter took more than 15 mins to come back and take our order. After giving us our food, she never came back until I asked someone else for help. What kind of service is this? We have been here, previously, many times and it was not this bad. If the restaurant is full then I understand, however, that was NOT the case on this day. I think they recently changed owners or managers ?? They've also taken some items off the menu.

I would avoid this place! Eat at Shake Shack or Pinstripes.

It was the week between Christmas and New Year's, a week when many people are on vacation and the mall is a great place to go. That makes the restaurants and food places very busy. Be patient, be kind, show grace.

That said, the food was delicious, The service was very slow but that was due to a large number of customers and few waitstaff. I get it. Our table of six had a great waiter who worked very hard to take care of us.

I thought CPK only served pizza as it had been decades since I ate at one in Southern California. This time I had a cup of tortilla soup, street corn, and guacamole and chips, all of which were delicious. Makes me want to try to CPK in Fresno and have these again.

This location has a bar with lots of tvs on showing a variety of sports shows. Being at Hillsdale Mall, the windows show the traffic, inside and outside, coming and going, great for people watching. I had used the restroom at Nordstroms, but hubby used the one at CPK and said it needed to be cleaned. Again, a matter of too few workers.

CPK San Mateo is located in the Hillsdale Mall and will meet your hunger pains while shopping. There's an open food court along with some upscale restaurants in this mall; however we wanted to eat in a sit-down, booth restaurant, with no wait. CPK met our needs.

This CPK is larger than it looks with a front and back section in its elongated design. Individual tables mostly in the front section while more booths are located in the back section. Service is decent although a little slow on getting bread and water.

Being Mushroom addicts (that sounded weird) we opted for the Mushroom Pizza with a side of Truffle Oil and the Vietnamese Salad with Chicken. We liked the pizza although it needed more mushrooms, the salad also needed more chicken and it's dressing was a bit light in taste.

Overall, it's ok if you don't want to wait for the upper priced nearby restaurants and don't want food court faire.

Food is on point as well the service but here is one very important suggestion we hope it will not fall on deaf ears.

I wash my hands before meals and going in the washroom makes it unappetizing and had to sit for a few minutes to clear what I saw. OMG ! I did not have the heart to post photos, go see for yourselves and you will understand clearly.

To the management of this branch. Please clean your restrooms ? The mens room urinal and toilet bowl seems to have never ever gotten a good scrubbing and the urinal has a thick calcium build up and the smell is unbearable. We go here 2 tines a week and the same restroom condition and it is in need of daily disinfecting and scrubbing. It only takes 5 minutes at closing to clean it and disinfect etc. Honestly we hate to see you all get bad ratings.

We will edit this review of things change on our next visit.