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| - I have mixed feelings about Tender. We went during Restaurant Week and had a not-so-great experience. I understand they get really busy during that time, but it is also a time to really dazzle your patrons and get them to come back. I'm not in any rush to get back there. I also found out that their restaurant week menu is offered every Monday, so there should not have been any surprises in tke kitchen, besides maybe more patrons than a typical Monday.
Brynn was our server and she was the best part of our meal. She was very sweet and very knowledgeable about the menu and cocktails. The bourbon in the drink I ordered was far too smoky for my liking, so she offered to either get me a new drink or doctor up the current one. I decided to see what they could do to change the current one with those grand shelves of liquor and was very impressed! She described what I didn't like about the drink to the bartender and they added some sort of citrus juice to take away the bite of the bourbon.
We ordered from the special Restaurant Week menu. I chose the Blue Burger with potato skins and my boyfriend chose the Tender Burger with bacon and a salad. This is where things started going downhill. The salad was ok and the skins were pretty much just roasted and seasoned potato cubes. We both ordered our burgers medium, so we were very disappointed when they came out VERY well done, almost charred and not even a sliver of pink in the middle. I was leery of sending it back to the kitchen after getting my drink fixed, but we decided to talk to our server and send them back. I figured we'd have to wait for a bit, but it seemed worth it to get a meal that was not overcooked. It took about 30 minutes for our food to come back out...needless to say, the rest of our party had long finished by the time it arrived. Tender is not a huge place, so it's not like they were preparing burgers for hundreds of people... Based on experiences in the past, I expected the kitchen wait time to be addressed by a manager, but nothing was mentioned.
When the second round of burgers (finally) came out, they were absolutely delicious. My review would definitely have been bumped up to 4 if that had come out the first time around, but the overall experience and service is just as important as the meal itself.
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