James P.
Yelp
One of my go-to places for date nights. Majority of the time have good to great experiences. This one fell short, unfortunately.
Let's not dismiss the entire experience. Host was great, she greeted us immediately with a smile. Let her know we had reservations set and she sat us in the back room. The bus girl greeted us with a smile and gave us waters. Off to a great night so far..
8 minutes rolls by, no server has greeted us or taken our order. I'm observing and it looks like there are two servers that are managing the back room. One is an Italian lady (great personality and has served us on multiple occasions) and a young Caucasian man (whom we've never seen before - assuming he is relatively new since we've been coming here for over a decade).
My wife actually starts getting impatient which is rare as I am usually the one that is more critical. I let her know that it's a busier day and let's wait a little more. After 15 minutes of being sat, our favorite server greets us and apologizes for the wait. She takes our food order and gets a few tastings to try as we debate on which Sonoma county bottle we want to order. Few minutes later, she brings the tastings and we decide that the Cabernet is what we prefer. We are anxiously waiting to let her know which one we prefer but we don't see her back for another 5-10 minutes. As I was commenting to my wife that the newer supporting server did not acknowledge us the entire time, he may have picked up through our body language that we needed assistance and all of a sudden and asked if we wanted another round. Had he been paying attention, he would've realized we recently got sat and did not even get a drink order in. We then asked him that we wanted a bottle of the Sonoma Cab.
Food came out before the wine - hence the timeline of everything and our original server came back with the wine afterwards. Et Cetera Cab from Sonoma county - highly recommend this at this price point. Fruit forward, dry wine with a mellow finish. It was an easy wine to drink and enjoyable.
Their menu continues to change every visit but was glad to hear that they still offered items that was no longer visible on their most current menu we saw tonight. We ordered the piccolo, crostini sampler, and Cesar salad.
Kudos to the ones who prepared the dishes. All
we'e made to perfection. The level of consistency maintains and that's why we continue to come back.
Our biggest disappointment was the service. On this Saturday night, my observation was that there was a combination of a server who takes her time to build relationships with her tables and does a fantastic job but during extremely busy times can work against her as there are new tables being sat. Then there was her supporting server - the newer gentlemen who I observed cherry picking tables on who he wants to engage with and ignore - this obviously did not result in the best combo. If you have one gentleman ignoring tables and the other spending time with her tables, it can leave tables sitting at their expense and can lead to a frustrating experience. There's wasn't a clear person on who managed what section or table.
As a person who worked in customer service for years, i observed the newer server engage and check on the two tables right in front of me on multiple occasions and did the bare minimum for our table and a newer table sat to our left. I'm not one to call people out but I have an obligation to hold people accountable when I observe things at a restaurant that I enjoy going to. My goal isn't to bash any individual but want to make sure they and management know that people are watching will hold them to a higher standard for a great place like this.
Going to take a break from here but will be back at some point. Food is great, wine is great, service was a big miss on this one. We're all human and mistakes can be made. Hopefully the next one is better.