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| - Service was spotty and distracted on both visits 5 days apart. Food was fairly well executed on the first visit but close attention to detail is lacking for the whopping premium we paid for hotel restaurant food.
I was surprised by my reaction to bad service but I think the very high price accentuated the bad service so while I would have given 3 stars for the food, the service was so distracted and bad, that for the premium I paid, I would have given no stars at all.
FIRST VISIT:
I had the salmon in miso broth. It was served on top of blanched bok choy. The ends of the bok choy leaves were yellowed and blackened---bad bad bad. Gordon Ramsey would have had a cow over it. My server forgot my side of rice. Brought it at the end of my meal. It was AWFUL! Lumpy and cooled. Fortunately the salmon was perfectly cooked and fresh.
My husband had the lamb burger. It was well executed and flavorful. The harira soup looked and tasted like Chef Boy Ardee with garbanzo beans. What a comical contrast.
My older son had the green pea risotto. Very well executed but again not enough attention to detail. The peas overwhelmed the risotto with their grassiness. The technique was excellent. The risotto was the right amount of toothsomeness and cheesiness but those grassy peas! Set my teeth on edge.
Don't ask for anything special and expect flawless service or for that matter anything straight off the menu. We asked for a hamburger for my son without the bun (he can't eat wheat). The burger came out properly done but obviously had sat under the warmer for so long that it had cooled and the cheese was hardening. Our server forgot the bacon. Brought it out later. We ordered sweet potato fries. He brought out regular fries. Sigh.
SECOND VISIT:
California chicken wrap with sweet potato fries, nachos, cheeseburger mid-rare with fries.
Disaster. Only two tables in the jernt. It took our food 30 minutes to arrive. A manager came by to apologize that one of the dishes had to be redone and food would arrive shortly. Okay, but I've been in a kitchen during down time between shifts with slackers and my antennae went shooting up.
Food starts to arrive. The chicken wrap came with a big fried egg in it---not in the menu description--granted, we didn't tell our server we have egg allergies, so we asked him to take it back. The sweet potato fries were limp and greasy--that means the frier wasn't up to temperature when they tossed in the frozen fries. I asked our server to take them back and have them redone.
When the chicken wrap came back, the avocado was super hard and other than being green was not recognizable as avocado. My twelve year old has a massive appetite and even he got turned off.
Our cheeseburger arrived in the same sad shape as it did on our first visit. Cooled with hardening cheese.
The nachos were comically bad. They too had sat under the heater and the cheese sauce (not real cheese) had started to congeal, the chips were soggy and the jalapeños dried out from the heat lamp. The chicken squares were dry.
My anger was starting to brim.
I have an unusually high threshold and it's hard for me to get too whipped up about poor or sloppy service b/c we usually eat at dives and "ethnic" eateries but when I pay a premium for hotel restaurant food--it's b/c I have to eat there for convenience, not by choice and if it's bad and not just pedestrian, it really burns me, but I usually have little time and energy to get heated about it. I just know what I'm dealing with and will lower my expectations and avoid them and issue a curse o'er their houses for eternity (that takes surprisingly little emotional energy b/c I only need to do it once and the bad experience is captured on yelp for future reference).
But this second visit exceeded even my high threshold for restaurant crappiness and when that happens, I have to act and act I did.
I complained to the manager whose response was someone in the kitchen didn't know what they were doing. Wow. That's completely unacceptable for a manger to say that to a customer. They didn't charge for the wrap. I didn't ask for any other comp. I was getting mad and I don't like being mad b/c it screws with my appetite--I actually won't eat when I'm unhappy.
First visit disappointment, shame on North Coast. Second visit disappointment, shame on me for expecting something different.
There will be no third time.
As I left the Intercontinental, I asked for a manager. I bent her ear about my complaints; she took a lot of notes and our room number at the Intercontinental Suites. That evening, C2 at the Intercontinental Suites provided our meal gratis to make up for the terrible experience we had at North Coast. We appreciated the effort by C2 and the Intercontinental Suites, but I won't be back to North Coast unless I have to go.
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