| rev:text
| - This is a difficult review to write because the food was actually very good, really, exceptional given the price. The problem was the service, which was unprofessional, sloppy, and generally disappointing: it takes a special type of bad service to overshadow such good food, but Le Local nailed it.
First, it was *insanely* slow. Two and a half hours to get two courses is just nuts. I am sure there are tables that like to linger, but it is really brutal to sit there for more than an hour after finishing your appetizers waiting for a main course. Among other things, we were hungry. There is just no excuse to completely ignore a table for that long.
Second, and massively compounding the first problem, we had to ask repeatedly when anyone ordered a drink. Setting aside that this was irritating, it was also strange: Le Local easily lost out on $100+ of high margin revenue from a single four-top simply because it was difficult to order drinks and the drinks didn't come when ordered. (And I should be clear, no one had more than two drinks during the nearly three hours between the time we walked in the door and the time we walked out. It's not as if we were boozing it up.)
Third, the waiter was kind of a jerk. Two guys at the table (one in particular) were your basic steak and potatoes guys. Sure, the one guy's questions about what food was were incredibly basic, but there was no need to be patronizing to him, which our waiter was. And there was *zero* degree of attentiveness (although, in fairness, since we had no food at our table for most of the time we were there, I'm not sure what there was to attend to).
Fourth, the waiter omitted key information. In particular, the medium rare steak was prepared exactly the way I like my steaks, which is to say it was really what most people think of as rare (red). The problem is that it wasn't my steak, and the guy who ordered it wanted it cooked the way you usually think of medium rare (basically pink, with a tiny bit of red in the center). You shouldn't serve someone a red "medium rare" steak without mentioning it to them first.
Bottom line: the food is (extremely) good, but it's some of the worst service I've ever experienced. Skip it.
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The above is offered with one quasi-caveat. There are two tables in the dining room that are either amazing or terrible based on your group's preference, basically, they are right on top of the open kitchen, so you have to be okay with a bell getting rung in your ear periodically. We were shown one of them: I would have really liked the table, but everyone else in my group was uncomfortable with the set-up. For that reason, they seated us in the lounge. Maybe the service in the dining room would have been better. (But if so, that still doesn't get them off the hook, with two tables that offer such an incredibly specific experience, a restaurant with any focus on the customer would have asked me if I wanted that table when they called to confirm my reservation.)
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