57. Vintner Grill

bad food, worse service
My husband and I have been here twice now and were unhappy to learn that our terrible first experience was not a fluke. I don’t remember the details of the first visit other than that the food was bland and the service was poor enough that we decided never to return (actually it put us off trying new restaurants all together). For a wedding gift we received a gift card so we thought we would give it another shot—a mistake. For an appetizer we had the “Moroccan spiced lamb spare ribs with apricot glaze and carrot-almond slaw”. The lamb was bland, completely unseasoned (not even salt, let alone “Moroccan spices”) and the “glaze” was a dish of saccharine apricot jam. The tablespoon of slaw was pretty good. For our main dishes, my husband had “pan seared diver scallops with shaved pecorino, heirloom tomato and sweet corn risotto,” and I had the “crab ravioli with fresh spring English peas, crimini mushrooms, baby tomatoes and pecorino.” My husband’s meal was pretty good, the scallops were well-cooked, and he liked the sweet corn risotto (it tasted like really sweet creamed corn). My meal was awful. The pasta on the ravioli was so bad I would have spit it out had there been some discreet way to do so. It had no flavor, and was really dense with a slimy coating. The best way to describe it is gummy. The peas were undercooked and broke apart in my mouth like partially hydrated dried beans. The sauce was okay, if bland, and the filling of the ravioli was actually pretty good, so after I cut off the paste-like pasta I had about 4 edible bites of dinner. We didn’t bother to give dessert a try, but since they buy it from somewhere else, it probably would have been the best part of the meal. Unbelievably, the service was actually even worse than the meal. We saw our waitress when she took the orders, and when she brought the check—an hour and a half later, after we had sat at an empty table for 20 minutes trying to flag someone down. We had no refills on our beverages that I didn’t track somebody down and ask for (and even that was difficult). We ate our entire main meal without drinks. Unfortunately we have quite a bit of money left on our gift card.

Great food and great service