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Noon Mediterranean

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Noon Mediterranean Reviews

2.6

33% would recommend to a friend

(72 total reviews)

Michael Heyne

18% approve of CEO

37% positive business outlook

Noon Mediterranean has an employee rating of 2.6 out of 5 stars, based on 72 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The Noon Mediterranean employee rating is 29% below average for employers within the Restaurants and food service industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

72 reviews
1.0
15 June 2013

Management degrades employees

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The sandwiches are alright. You get 50% off. The work is menial and easy.

Cons

I could never recommend that anyone work here. I was hired on as a minimum wage, line employee. During the interview I was informed by one of the co-owners that Verts is a growing company, hoping to open several new restaurants in Austin and greater Texas, and there would be plenty of opportunity to move in to management position and even potentially a job within the corporate office. This was untrue. A couple of weeks into my employment, uppermanagement hired on a host of new managers for their stores. None of these new hires came from within the company (and this includes a number of hard-working, qualified employees who had been with Verts for nearly two years in some instances). The management style of this place is "chew out your subordinates." On several occasions I heard middle-management claim they were sick of being hassled and "chewed out" by those in the corporate office, who were concerned about lackluster sales at the particular Verts location I worked at. These chew-outs make their way down the line. The manager I was originally hired under is one of the most insufferable, ego-tripping bastards I have ever had the misfortune of meeting. Problems with sales at the store were then blamed on the minimum wage line-service staff by middle-management. We were incompetent and therefore customers were failing to return to our location to eat (this is contradicted by Yelp reviews for the store location I worked at, which ubiquitously praise the line staff). Management would change basic restaurant procedures absurdly often, with no coherent explanation of new procedures and then hourly employees were taken to task for failing to follow the update procedures. Nextly, if you are looking for a place to work that maintains the vibe of Austin this is the opposite of the sort of place you are looking for. The upper-management at Verts are obsessed with becoming millionaires and starting up the Subway or Chipoltle of kebap sandwiches, they are not interested in creating a cool Austin spot. They want uniformity. They want you to wipe your personality and just be salesman for their crappy side-options as you interact with customers. They do not source things locally the way they claim to (for example, our tortillas DO NOT come from El Milagro, despite the fact that El Milagro tortillas are advertised and the schematics for customer interaction pasted behind the line instruct employees to say that the tortillas come from Milagro). Also, if you take a job here your schedule will consist of split-double shifts 3-4 times a week. For example, you may be scheduled to work from 10-2 and then 5:30-11. If you have to take the bus home you will have no time to do so during this break. So what happens, in practise, is that you sit around Verts for 13 hours on this day, despite the fact that you are going to be paid for 9. Also, if you forget to clock out after you get off your shift, Vert's official policy is that you forfeit your payment for that shift. Bottom line: the owners of this place have business degrees and no sense of how to interact with or treat employees underneath them, no management experience, no restaurant experience, and they seem to believe that demeaning their middle-management and hourly staff is the best way to operate their restaurant. Hourly staff was mocked and insulted in emails amongst corporate management, and this in turn makes it very difficult to prove your efficacy as an employee or even hope to make more than 8$ an hour there. Last comment: After two weeks of work my paycheck was routinely less than 400$. Only take this job if you have no dignity, are a college student who doesn't actually need to make money, or if you are 14-16 years old and this is your first job. Awful, awful place to work. I would not even spend my money on a sandwich from this place after my experience working there.

2.0
16 Dec 2016

We are one family......NOT!!

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I worked for Verts for 2.5 years in their corporate office as an accountant. To begin, I will address each of the following areas: Company environment, quality of product, compensation, and work/life balance. It’s hard to assign an overall score, but I would give them 2 stars personally based on the fact that I would not consider working for them again. Company environment: 2/5. From the first day that I started, it was obvious that there would be long hours. In fact, contracts stipulated that each employee must work 50 hours a week, with a 30 minute lunch break, which came out to daily hours of 9-7. I will admit that it was difficult to finish all my work even during these long hours, and often came in on the weekend to work on month end closings because it simply was not possible to complete all my tasks. Reviews were done quarterly, and were well documented by management. The general attitude was: “If you don’t look stressed, you must not have enough on your plate.” At one point, I tracked my overtime so that I could bring it up in my next quarterly meeting. After providing a daily tracking spreadsheet I was told that it was “extremely unprofessional” by one of the owners of the company. I thought I was being pro-active by showing that our department was growing at an incredibly fast pace and we needed to hire another person, my boss told me to stop tracking my overtime immediately. I can’t speak for the other departments (facilities, marketing and administrative) but I can say for the accounting department that the workloads are brutal and under-appreciated by ownership. The company is made up of the corporate office with 20 or so employees, and the restaurant teams with about 300 employees. I worked directly with the restaurant assistant managers, managers, area managers and regional managers. I believe that their experiences were very similar to mine: average pay, very long hours, not a lot of respect from ownership, very little job growth or opportunity. My reasoning behind this is the extremely high turnover at the management level, including the highest operational level in the company which was area managers and regional managers. It is expected that staff working at $9/hour will come and go, it is not expected that management will have equally high turnover. In the final year of my employment, the following people left Verts for better opportunities: 2 Office managers, the entire marketing department, Director of HR, Regional manager (the highest operational position in the company), Facilities Assistant, Internal Financial Accountant, Director of Accounting, and Director of Training. I would be frightened if this was my company. Quality of Product: 2/5. When I first started working at Verts, the kebaps were fantastic. I ate them everyday, and even on weekends. After about a year though, something changed in the recipe and it was never the same. I would guess that the quality of the meat was downgraded, this was echoed by many managers who worked with the meat cones daily and shared their input with me. I found this very unfortunate as the kebap meat is the signature item on their menu. After two complete company rebrands, from Verts to VertsKebap, and VertsKebap to Verts Mediterranean Grill, many more items were added to the menu such as garbonzo beans, mixed grilled veggies, hummus and rice bowls. These items diversified the menu significantly. I don’t believe the “quality” of any of these particular offerings are high, the rice for example is yellow but has almost no flavor at all. Overall, I saw many people that I worked with go from “hey this is great!” to “my stomach feels pretty weird”, so I can’t highly recommend the product. Compensation: 2/5 Pay is completely average at Verts. After seeing the massive workload that I was expected to complete, I asked for a raise and was told that I “should have done a better job negotiating my salary”. Sounds pretty corporate for a startup right? My question is this: Verts is trying to put a restaurant on every corner in every city, right next to Chipotle, so their growth is massive. If the number of restaurants increases by 40% every year, and my workload increases correspondingly, why wouldn’t I ask for a raise every year? The company is literally being built brick by brick by the people in the corporate office, yet they are not highly valued by ownership. There is also no 401k, and the standard 10 days of vacation. Work/life balance: 2/5: A couple of things go into this consideration: how much work is there, how many hours do I have to complete the work, and how much time off do I get? After the first year, contracts were re-negotiated from 50 hours per week to 45 hours per week. A standard work day was 9-6. This was not due to ownership trying to be kind to it’s employees, the corporate office employees literally got together and decided that 50 hours a week was not sustainable and made it very obvious that we were all unhappy. In January of 2016, the corporate office moved from a tiny office in the Dobie Mall to a fairly large suite in the W hotel in downtown Austin. This was a MASSIVE improvement for all the corporate employees. I would personally say that this was done out of necessity, our marketing department quadrupled in size alone. The new office was pretty swanky, with a keg-erator and foosball and plenty of free snacks. Parking was also provided which was very nice. I applaud ownership’s recent changes in this regard. As already discussed, the workload was very large, and with only the standard two weeks of vacation a year you start feeling a bit squeezed. An extra week is available for sick time, although no one ever took sick time because there was…. Too much work to do! Both of the owners are German, which begs the question even more of why they don’t offer more vacation to their employees? It is widely known that more vacation leads to higher employee satisfaction, less stress, and lower turnover. Europe is notorious for offering large amount of vacation to it’s workers, I was very surprised that they aren’t continuing that philosophy in America. To sum up, I can’t currently recommend working for Verts. I believe that they are “trying” to retain top talent and foster a better working environment, but that since these initiatives are ultimately tied to cost that it is a losing game. They claim they are currently the “fastest growing fast casual” restaurant in the United States, so there isn’t a lot of time or money left over for employee growth, reduced workload, or additional pay / vacation.

Cons

Please see above for a complete description.

avatar
Noon Mediterranean Response
8y
Thank you for sharing your feedback and perspective. We take this seriously and your comments will help us learn and grow as an organization. Thank you for your commitment and clearly hard work and contributions to VERTS!
1.0
26 Sept 2015

Verts Needs a Reality Check

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Interesting food concept with the opportunity to expand outside the state some very talented coworkers who have very great backgrounds

Cons

Management makes all these promises during interviews: "growth opportunities, you'll be able to really take charge of projects, we are hiring you because YOU are the specialist and we need to listen to your recommendations, we are a family, etc" and has not shown to honor any of them. Not only do they continuously belittle the employees that work for them, they are horrible at micromanaging and you'll report to people who have no sense of why your work is valuable and won't acknowledge the hard work you do, even when they cancel projects you've spent a long time working on. Not only that, but there is an almost active attempt to dissuade communication and collaboration between departments, which oftentimes makes certain tasks more difficult to perform. Additionally, you'll be doing work well outside your job scope, and despite your feelings about it, will be doing them anyways. They attempt to foster a culture of family and togetherness, but the actions of management and owners show the exact opposite. .

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Glassdoor has 76 Noon Mediterranean reviews submitted anonymously by Noon Mediterranean employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Noon Mediterranean is right for you.