Avens O.
Yelp
It was my best friend's 36th birthday and she really wanted to do brunch here. We had dinner at the Chateau Marmont recently and it was excellent, so we've been kind of in the mood to try out the various restaurants of classic hotels in the city.
The hotel is lovely in an old fashioned sort of way, the history is really the attraction. It does come off as a bit pretentious and bougie but we were prepared for that, though I wish it was as good as it was self-important.
We were also prepared for the prices, but expected incredible food. We got the flat bread pizza and the eggs Benedict, and honestly both were absolutely delicious and I know that the cost is not in the actual food but in the ambiance, so though I would rarely bother to pay $40 for an eggs benedict, it was fine. The size of the portions was excellent.
Unfortunately, the service was terrible. We had a 1:00 reservation and we were a bit late, we got there at 1:10 and they seated us right away. A few minutes later she came by to get our drink orders, honestly those were both tremendously overpriced and non-alcoholic ($25 for a coconut). But again, I know we're paying for the place, so we were expecting this.
However they never brought over waters, and then they took our food order when they delivered the drinks, the food order came out in a fairly timely fashion, and then nobody checked on us again for over an hour.
The waitress didn't come by to ask if a food was to our liking, didn't come by to ask if we needed waters or refills on our drinks.
I had a very brightly colored non-alcoholic juice beverage, and when I got about 3/4 through it, I started rationing it because I realized they hadn't come by and I didn't want to be without a beverage. My drink sat there slowly dwindling for over half an hour without any check in. It was clearly obvious (as I said, it was brightly colored) if anyone server bothered to walk by, and we got to a point where we started very obviously looking around for wait staff, only to spend at least 10 minutes not seeing a single server within view of our table.
We finally flagged down a waitress who came to bring the bill to a table near us, and asked her for sparkling water and a coffee. Just a few minutes later our regular waitress came by, asked if we needed anything, we explained we already ordered sparkling water and coffee from the other waitress because we hadn't seen her in an hour.
A few minutes later we received our sparkling water, coffee, and the two glasses of water which should have been delivered at the beginning of our meal. The cups for the sparkling water were plastic, and honestly I don't believe they were dirty but they were scratched up the way that acrylic tends to get over time. It wasn't the best look, especially since everything else was glass.
I finally asked for the check, and thankfully at that point they remembered that it was a birthday and they brought out the piece of cake. Honestly, the cake was the highlight. It was absolutely amazing, a flourless chocolate and raspberry cake. And of course they didn't charge for that, but it was easily the best thing on the menu.
Ultimately, we expected the price, we expected the quality of food, we didn't expect how good the dessert would be (5 stars for that!), and we were deeply disappointed with the service. We spent 2 hours there and barely saw our waitress. I'm hoping that was a one-time situation, but it wasn't like it was busy - there are very few people there. I appreciate when servers want to give you privacy to have conversations, but no check in to see if our food was to our liking or if our drinks needed to be refilled was pretty sad.
Honestly, if you're interested in the history and you want to impress someone by not caring about price, this is a decent place. If you actually want good service, my experience tells me go elsewhere.
At some point I'm sure I will try again and see if this was a fluke, but I'm not in any rush, even though it's conveniently located to me (I'm in Bel Air, the country club restaurant has a nicer vibe with much better service).