Anne C.
Yelp
Expensive, bad steaks, bad drink, poor service. If the server hadn't dumped water on me, or if they'd taken something off our bill because, hey, we're sorry about spilling water on you, it would have been two stars (fun ambience, good tuna tacos)
Our meal tonight at STK Bellevue started out so well and by the end, we were out $350 and we couldn't wait to leave.
We were very excited to come here on a Saturday night at the tail end of Seattle Restaurant Week - we love SRW and spend hours researching which restaurants we want to go to, either through SRW or afterwards. We were promptly seated at a great table and our drink order went in as well as a request for appetizers. We liked the fun floral decor, the music, the sparkly pink and multicolored LED lighting. And then the food started arriving...
The calamari was overcooked, very brown and chewy, and "out of a bag" says dining partner. Sauces were uninspired. I appreciated that it came out searingly hot along with two freshly blistered shishito peppers; the fried Thai chiles that came with it were incendiary and didn't enhance the dish.
Dining partner's Old Fashioned took a long time to arrive and was really watery and one-dimensional, certainly not an interesting or worthwhile $22 cocktail.
We decided to get the SRW menu ($65 pp) as it looked intriguing and it's what got us in the door to try the restaurant.
We were very happy with our other two appetizers. The tuna tacos were delicious, three crispy taro shells holding guacamole and a generous amount of diced tuna garnished with microgreens. The half dozen oysters were fresh and tiny - possibly Kumamotos? - and the cocktail sauce, a you-mix-it ketchup with grated horseradish on top, was fabulous. Several tiny shell pieces in the oyster, maybe more than expected, but the oysters were very petite so maybe difficult to shuck? The mignonette was meh, very heavy on the vinegar.
The salmon was OK but slightly overcooked and the cloyingly sweet maple chipotle sauce extracted joy from the fish. Two split cherry tomatoes in a smear of olive paste and three stems of broccolini garnished the dish.
The guys both ordered medium rare steaks and they came out seared on the outside and completely raw all the way through - you know, when it's 1/8 of an inch of sear and the rest is just cold raw meat. Both steaks had to go back. When they came out, they'd been replated with the same damn potatoes which were now cold and the steaks - the same steaks, cooked some more - were more on the medium side then on the medium rare side. Served with another super sweet sauce that didn't enhance the food. Dining partner didn't even finish his potatoes... and he loves potatoes. But no one loves a cold potato with their overcooked steak.
Mac & cheese was bland, truffle fries were OK and came out hot which was great.
And while I was waiting for their food, and my salmon was getting cold - our waitress dumped a good glug of water down my back while doing refills. She realized what had happened and brought me a napkin, but it had soaked through my sweater and into my shirt and there was no drying off to be had, especially with a stain-proof non-absorbent napkin.
She was very good about keeping our glasses refilled, which we all appreciated, and attentive about service. Bussing was so eager to pull plates from our table that the busser pointedly asked me to move so she could get at the plates - sorry, that's not what is done for good service. You could tell there was pressure to turn our table sooner rather than later.
We'd all ordered Apple Crumble and it was terrible, probably made at some factory foodservice place offsite, oddly crisp preserved apples soaked in some type of Expandex tapioca starch glop, a "dessert" that was more sweet thick sauce than fruit, and somewhere in the middle of the goo was the occasional crunchy bit of crumble. It was closer to canned apple pie filling than anything with fresh apples (and we're in Washington - we have excellent apples here.) The ice cream was by far the best part but none of us finished the dessert, and we all love apple based desserts.
During dessert the restaurant dropped the lights, passed out extremely syrupy shots, and cranked the music up to 94 db. This may or may not constitute fun for you :-)
When our bill came, we were stunned to see that there was no "gee, we're sorry water got dumped on you" factored in. I was cold, wet, and wanted to go home. We paid the bill and got the hell out.