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| - Did I really enjoy going to Landmark for Arizona Restaurant Week? Not so much. Growing up in the East Valley, I have always heard a lot of good things about this place. It's a really neat historic building and is definitely one of the more "upscale" places to dine in the area. Unfortunately, by upscale I only mean price and not atmosphere or food preparation. The interior is very Victorian, with wallpaper covering every inch of available wall space and antique looking furniture sprinkled throughout. This apparently is a siren song for old people, because let me tell ya, this place is packed with geriatrics.
As far as the food goes, my first course, crab cakes, second course, filet mignon, and third course, pecan pie. Also included in the prix fixe menu was the salad room. We made our way to the salad room before the apps came out and I wasn't wowed. A "Salad Room" doesn't really impress me. Aren't all salad bars essentially in a room? The ingredients were all fresh and tasted good, but it wasn't anything spectacular. I found it odd that there were a lot of hot meal type foods in there as well. After we ate our salads, the crab cakes came out and the presentation could have used some help. Two 1" thick cakes were sitting atop some shredded lettuce. Not very pretty. Taste wise, they were okay, but were lacking the wow factor. Now, my filet was pretty good. It was a very generous size of meat and it was actually a very excellent cut of meat as well. I ordered it medium and I actually got a very nicely cooked medium. The middle was just melt in your mouth, but the outsides were over-charred. The side of mashed potatoes tasted like mashed potatoes. They also serve you a random side of candied carrots to split. They were like quintessential old people food. My pie was good but didn't really taste special.
Service here was good, and maybe a little too enthusiastic and eager to please. The nametags with the server's hometown was a little "theme park" to me, but whatever. I know I won't be back unless someone takes me here. On my own, I will stick to the better restaurants in Phoenix.
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