To start I have always loved Estia. I love their other restaurant Almyra as well. As a family we…read morehave been coming here for parties and hosting dinners and events in the main area or in various private rooms downstairs for over 15 years.
Last night we hosted a dinner of 10 people in the small wine room in the basement. It's a very cute room. It's perfect for a small group.
Unfortunately that's where the perfect ends. Our server seem nice enough in the beginning, but couldn't really get it together to be around to make sure that we had what we needed, there was no one there to check on us to handle the timing for drinks, appetizers, etc.
When we arrived, the room was an icebox. It was freezing, which was easy to fix as the settings were in the room. The table was dressed with the regular things, but the hummus was in two tiny dishes that had obviously been sitting there for a while and were crusted on top and bread that was cold, no pita nothing cooked. That was one of our table dishes that we ordered as well as taramosalata, calamari and spanakopita. The taramosalata we had ordered as an additional item on a $65 per person set menu with options for your entrée. Unfortunately, it was very bland not the way it used to be when it came. It also did not come with pita which we had to ask for and both the hummus and taramosalata came in teeny tiny dishes, almost the size is what you'd put your soy sauce in at a sushi restaurant. There were four of those tiny dishes (2 of each item) for a table of 10.
The next to come was the calamari and the spanakopita. Honestly, I've had better versions of this frozen from Costco than we were served last night. The calamari was not fresh and not homemade, there were no tentacles nothing but rings. It was also cold by the time we got it and par baked. The spanakopita were teeny, tiny triangles, smaller than what you'd even get at Costco and folded so many times in the dough that they were not flaky and honestly horrible. Nobody ate them.
Next to come were the salads. That was probably the best course of the night. The take on a Caesar salad with dill was very good so was the tomato traditional Greek salad with feta. It would be nice though if they broke up the feta as there was only three large pieces of feta in there, and if anyone took one, then when you passed things down, the other people did not get any. Seeing as this was all served family style you would think they might have thought of that.
Next was the main courses the options were a chicken dish, a fish dish, a lamb dish and a pasta dish. Honestly, the fish dish looked the best of all the dishes, but by the time the food got to us, everything was no longer hot. Five people ordered lamb dishe which was almost inedible. It was shredded meat from a lamb shank that was served in a tiny circular way like it had been molded into a dish and then turned over with some sort of strange sauce underneath it that supposedly was pasta. It was so small it might as well have been something that you would've gotten as an appetizer. Ironically, it was so bad that you didn't want to eat it and everyone left it on their plate. Personally, mine had shards of bone in it, which made my first bite extremely unpleasant and sadly my second bite did too, so I just pushed the it aside and did not continue eating.
There was no option for dessert. They just brought down some sort of honey cake that unfortunately they didn't ask if anyone had allergies or anything which a lot of of us do so only a few could eat it, one person ended up taking the majority of the cake home with them.
All of this went unnoticed by our server who was rude to the majority of our party. As mentioned before we normally love this restaurant but last night was not a good experience at all. It was extremely disappointing to be treated so cavalierly and as if our party was a downstairs was an afterthought.
