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| - Was really excited about this place when we saw it was opened. What a mess. The overall problem, as others have noted on here, is that it has so many concepts, it's confusing. For instance, I'm still not sure if I order at the pastry counter if I want to sit at the bar (is this a bar? a fastfood restaurant?).
Anyway, my wife and I went for lunch. Arrived around 11:30 and were greeted at the door by a guy explaining how to order (which was much appreciated). Ordering still was pretty chaotic. At the end of it, we were left to carry our number, my beer, my wife's iced tea, a to-go cookie, and a plated cupcake without a tray. I was worried about dropping stuff, because it's a big space and I didn't have the best grip on my beer.
Then we hit the second problem: there was no inside seating because all the inside tables, including the six-top picnic tables, were taken up with single people working on laptops (so is this a coffee shop?). The only open inside tables were a couple of tree stump looking things with low benches and a patio chaise lounge. So we went outside on a day when it was 93 out and we'd just walked five blocks. Which is fine, I mean I don't like eating outside in Phoenix because of how hot it is, and I certainly don't think my wife and I would have ordered a hamburger and a chile verde potpie if we had known we were going to be outdoors.
Anyway, so we sit down. There are as few tables outdoors as indoors, because most of the outdoor seating is taken up by a long picnic table being used by a guy on a laptop again and a couple of benches in front of the fireplace that no one was using (again, is this place supposed to be a bar?).
Our food comes out. We had already decided, hot and annoyed as we were, that if the food was good, we'd be willing to overlook everything else. It wasn't good. My burger was fine, although the brioche bun was either based on a terrible recipe or, more likely, a day old roll, as it was very stale and tasted old. Additionally, the bun was about an inch bigger than the burger, so I had to eat through all that stale bread to get to the patie.
The chile verde potpie my wife had was less disappointing but still not good. The pork was well cooked and very tender, but the chile verde was very clearly red and heavily seasoned with chili powder. While there were some chopped green chiles floating in the mix, it mostly tasted like Easterner's idea of chili that has been cooked in a crock pot all day. Which isn't to say it was bad, far from it. This was very good chili, but don't call it chile verde if it isn't made out of green chiles, onions, and pork. Again, it's not that the dish is bad, it's just not what my wife wanted or thought she was getting.
Also because we were both so hot from our walk and sitting on the porch (in the sun, I might add), we didn't finish our meal. We never got water, nor did we ever see where we were supposed to get it. I'm guessing from other reviews that I'm supposed to get my own water, but given that we barely made it to our table as it is, I'm not sure how that would have happened.
All told, the food wasn't fresh or prepared as described, most of the seating was taken up by coffee shop patrons, and the experience was confusing. I think most of the problems with this place result from it trying to be a coffee shop AND a bar AND a restaurant, while not being particularly good at any of them. Moreover, there are much better coffee shops, bars, and restaurants downtown. That said, I think some of these problems could be fixed by better seating arrangements and clear signage. Also, I think the owners should seriously consider ditching the confusing counter service and just run the space as a normal restaurant.
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