Kitchen K

Last week, the dining club checked out Kitchen K. My first impression upon walking in was that I really liked the open kitchen. The hostess stand is placed in a kind of awkward place, making the bar a little difficult to find. Once we got to the bar, I noticed the music. It was a pounding club beat that I found a tiny bit annoying. The bar staff was very friendly and we happened to be there during happy hour. The best part was the Blood Orange Cosmo. Very good and around $4.00 during happy hour.

We were finally seated when our party arrived. There were 11 of us this time, so we were seated in the loft. It took a while for our waiter to get up and take our drink orders, but we were fine with that since we were talking and we had just gotten settled. About 20 minutes after we got our drinks, our order was finally taken. After that point, our waiter disappeared until our food was ready.

The Habanero Chicken Wings are absolutely delicious! They were glazed, and not heavily sauced like most wings. The dip for these wings is very good! A definite must have. We all had salads and we all found them to be mostly uninspired and tasteless. For a main dish, I had a ribeye with a ragout. My steak was cooked perfectly, however I must admit the ragout was horrible. Not only in presentation, but taste as well. Chris had the mahi-mahi that came with baby potatoes. The potatoes were good, but the mahi-mahi was very bland. Out of our group of 11, only two people enjoyed their dishes. Those two people had the same dish, the filet with mashed potatoes and asparagus. I wouldn't say the food was bad, just the majority of what we had wasn't up to par with restaurants we've visited in the past.

I can't comment on dessert because none of us had any. We were not offered any. This leads me to explain the service we received. As I said above, our waiter was pretty non-existent at our table. Our drinks were not refilled, sans once by the bus boy. We were very surprise at the lack of service our group received, considering we've dined out as a group at many different places around the St. Louis area and have never had a problem with service that was this bad. After dinner, we waited so long for coffee and dessert that we actually witnessed other waiters putting the desserts away in the coolers. (One of the pluses or minues of having an open kitchen.) Finally, after we had been done with dinner for about 30 minutes or so, we went down to speak with the manager regarding our service. Basically, we were given many excuses as to why our waiter wasn't attentive to us, and then the 11 of us were offered (1) gift card of $25 and free dessert. That's about $2.72 per person! What a deal. We just asked for our check. After this point, our waiter actually came up to confront us about our complaint. He began yelling at one of our members. At this point, it was just surreal. We told him that it was extremely unprofessional and again, asked for our check. It took another 20 minutes to get our checks. We ended up cutting the $25 gift card in half when we left. That was extremely insulting.

The following day, I sent an email to the owner, Pablo and another one of our members called him. This is the weird part. He apologized profusely and told both of us that our waiter was going to be fired as a result of this because apparently he had a track record of bad service. Pablo then told me he was going to shoot me back an email and he hoped we would return to Kitchen K to try it out again. As of this morning, I have not received a reply from Pablo. During our call, he asked me not to write a bad review about this restaurant.

There's no doubt in my mind that should I return, perhaps during lunch that I would not receive the same horrible service. However, I'm very hesitant due to the service we received from the dining room manager. We were never apologized too, and that's the major beef we have. In no way am I saying Pablo is responsible for what happened, however I feel that service is top priority when dealing with the public is your main focus. I can deal with bad food, if the service is top notch. Unfortunately at this point, none of us plan on returning to Kitchen K. However, I do encourage you to find out for yourselves. My recommendations are the Blood Orange Cosmo, and the Habanero Wings. My hope would be that you would have a better experience than we did.