After reading a lot about the parking situation at Johnny Manhattan's, my wife and I were pleasantly surprised to find a parking spot right away upon arriving around 7 PM on a Saturday evening. Unfortunately, that was the highlight of the next couple of hours...
We got seats at the bar right away (beautiful bar, by the way) and had a front row seat to watch the three bartenders passing back and forth in front of us for the next 20 minutes or so. They seemed to be keeping busy - emptying the dishwasher, taste-testing the tonic water because they were having drinks sent back for bad tasting tonic, etc. - but they couldn't quite manage to notice us long enough to take our order. After 20 minutes, we finally had our order taken. I closed out our tab right away because I could already foresee waiting another 20 minutes to get someone's attention to pay our tab once our table was ready - and it was ready shortly thereafter. Thus began the next, slightly bizarre, portion of our evening.
After being seated, our waitress arrived around five minutes later. She took my second drink order, a vodka martini, and our appetizer order of escargot. Then she recommended the burrata... "in case we were thinking about an appetizer," she said. Uhm... you do notice that I've already mentioned her taking our escargot appetizer order, right? Maybe 30 seconds earlier? We told her that we'd just stick with the escargot...
My drink came a bit before the escargot, and it was room temperature. I don't know about you, but warm vodka has never really appealed to me. I asked if they could chill it down for me and they did - much better. When they brought the chilled martini back, my wife ordered another glass of wine.
We were very pleased with the escargot. They were large and flavorful and there were 18 of them! They came with some thick Texas toast-style bread and were delicious. Our waitress came by to check on how they were and to take our dinner order. After ordering our dinners, we also took the opportunity to remind her of my wife's wine order...
Shortly after we finished our appetizer, our waitress returned. She had lost our dinner order, so needed to take it again. After repeating our order, we also took the opportunity to remind her of my wife's wine order...
About ten minutes later, our salads arrived. They were excellent. The dressings were apparently house-made and very tasty - and the salads were accompanied by some very good crusty bread. By the time our waitress came back to get the plates we still had no complaints about the food whatsoever. At that time, we did, however, take the opportunity to remind our waitress of my wife's wine order...
Next, and you may have a hard time believing this, but... the wine arrived!!!
Our dinners followed shortly thereafter. I had the prime rib and my wife had the filet. Both steaks were great! For sides, my wife had the buttermilk ranch mashed potatoes and loved them and my baked potato was very good.
Clearly, food-wise, Johnny Manhattan's has things well in hand. This would be a four-star review if I was only talking about the food... and isn't that supposed to be the hard part? Making high quality, consistently-delicious food? Unfortunately, the service brought the entire experience down. I don't think we'll be making a trip back, which is a real shame because the food was so good! read more