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| - This is a place I'm going to put on my list to try under 'normal' circumstances. Went here on a Tuesday night (7-25-17) around 8:00 pm for Restaurant Week and the place was SLAMMED. As a result, the service was extremely spotty throughout the entire meal.
Essex is a beautiful space with a large, open patio and interior dining area. I met up with a group of fellow Yelp elites as we had a reservation (six in total). We each placed our orders and waited for the food to arrive. While waiting, I took note of how extremely loud it was. We were seated at the very front and I had to shout across the table and ask for things to be repeated because of the high noise level. When I got up to use the bathroom, I noticed how much quieter it is/was, the further you go back.
The orders were brought out in a staggered fashion. We all ordered salads as the first course, however, they didn't all come out at the same time. Then our second courses came, one by one, not all at once, and so on.
As for my choice of food:
First course - greek salad. Nothing really of note about the salad. I asked the waitress for no feta, and after waiting around, the salad came out with, you guessed it, feta. I ate around it.
Second courses - shrimp and scallop ceviche and lobster tacos. The ceviche was beautifully presented and tasted very light and fresh. The lobster tacos were extremely small and fried a little too hard. I was not a fan of those. Not much flavor and not at all worth their normal menu price of $19.
Dessert - tiramisu. Not a typical tiramisu, in that no real layers of ladyfingers were to be found and not much coffee-flavoring either. This was more of a tiramisu pudding and I don't believe it's on their normal dessert menu which should tell you something.
It's always disappointing when a meal you've been looking forward to is marred by unsatisfactory service and subpar food. Restaurant Week is always a great time to find out how efficiently a restaurant can run things and the Essex staff seemed quite overwhelmed and confusingly unprepared. The place is located right in the heart of Uptown, I'm sure Friday/Saturday nights are a nightmare. Essex promotes itself as a 'premium craft bar" but I couldn't find anything premium about the food nor service.
Major tip about parking - park in the Auto Park parking deck on 260 S Church St and the host/hostess will validate your parking. That little thing was the best part of my Essex experience.
Like I said, I plan to go back and will hopefully be able to report back differently.
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