Hot Rock Cafe
If money is no object, the food here is 5/5. Truly excellent. We are here last week. I tried the duck confit, the moo ping, the tomatoes appetizer (which sorely needed some bread with it) and the peach crunch dessert. Others had the ribeye which they said was delicious. No complaints about the quality of the food or the portion size. Appetizers were shareable with one other person and the entrees were one-person sized.
I would give fewer stars for the price and for some parts of the service.
First, on price, our cheapest entree was $58 and the priciest was $64. I eat out a lot is Denver, SF, DC, and NYC. Those would be sturdy prices in a large city. They felt exceptionally high in Palisade, in an agricultural center where local ingredients are prized and available.
The small loaf of sourdough bread was also particularly shocking at $14. I have no problem paying for bread. But I bake bread a lot and even when I use heritage grains from Colorado, my materials cost for a loaf this size would be maybe $3, at most. Yes. There is the cost of labor, but bread is a volume production. $14 is crazy.
In the end it was nearly $160 per person for our party. That's each person having 2 drinks, one entree, and sharing an appetizer, bread, and dessert.
I don't mind spending my paycheck on experiences, but now that I've had this experience, I can't imagine I'd ever go back. It's too pricey.
For the service, the staff was great. Very nice overall. My criticism is about how gimmicky it was. Here are some examples. Many cocktails were presented in a test tube that is emptied into your glass at the table. Why do this? It felt like someone confused complexity with quality. The whole test tube thing didn't elevate the experience or the flavor. Similarly one of the dishes is two skewers of meat stuck into a scorching hot rock about the size of a baseball cap. The rock is heavy and hard to move around the table. It looked unwieldy for the staff to place on the table. We kept burning ourselves if we brushed against it (it really was hot). And it took an extra trip for the staff to clear it at the end of the meal. Unlike a fajita pan which is hot because the food is cooked on it, this rock didn't seem to have a function. Maybe keep the skewers warm? But no other dishes had a setup like that. It was just a menace at the table, and probably in the back of the house.
Finally, there was some dish (maybe a dessert?) that was prepared around us at 3 different tables-- but I never actually saw what it was. My impression was that the staff/chef was branding or torching something table-side. It would happen very fast, with a huge cloud of smoke that filled the room, followed by the bitter/sweet smell of caramelized sugar. Maybe a crème brûlée? Since I didn't taste it, I can't say if that was a gimmick that actually paid off in a better dish than if prepared in the kitchen.
I enjoyed the experience of our meal, but would not repeat. read more