Visiting Hutchinson, MN for a reunion I had the opportunity to try out the River House Kitchen. I'd heard a lot about it but it IS a restaurant and it needs to be judged by their food. I have visited restaurant all over the world, including some of the best steak restaurants in the US. I was really looking forward to a visit. Lets touch on the help first, since this is your first contact with the restaurant. We arrived about 5 PM and asked to be seated on the ground floor at a table near the window. The hostess said they were going to put us on the 2nd floor... I again said NO, we want to sit on the ground floor. I pointed out that there were TWO tables by the windows and asked why we couldn't sit there. She refused to seat us there and reiterated that we HAD to be seated on the 2nd floor, even though there were numerous tables occupied on the first floor. So she said to follow her as she went up the stairs. NEVER in my experience have I ever had someone deny a seating location AND tell me where I had to sit, when open tables were available. Courtesy score: ZERO Idiocy Score: 100.
So we get seated upstairs and ordered a variety of dishes. One steak ($34) a pasta dish, the tacos, a hamburger and salads. One of our group asked the waitress for some Parmesan cheese and her response was incredible... She whined that she would have to go all the way down stairs to get it. Courtesy score: ZERO. Who wants to put up with a whiney waitress. If you didn't want to have to go ALL THE WAY downstairs, you should have seated us there as we asked earlier. When the food came it was accompanied by the salads that we had also ordered. You DON"T serve a salad with the main course because if you eat the salad first (customary) you then wind up with cold food... Duh! She didn't want to have to make another trip downstairs so she just served them together. Lack of waiting skills... 100% The food came... mine, the steak... was abysmal. It was the first 3/8" thick ribeye I had ever seen. When presented by the waitress I noticed there was no steak knife on the table and was about to ask for one when I noticed bit of the knife's greasy handle sticking out from under my steak. The accompanying mixed vegetables were nothing more than a Normandy mix of of frozen vegetables like you get from Costco. Scattered all around the plate. It looked like a 5 yr. old had put it together. The hamburger, if you'd call it that, was a reheated frozen beef patty, just like the ones at Costco only lukewarm, instead of frozen. It was tasteless and dry. You'd have been FAR better off with a Quarter Pounder at McDonalds. Seriously... you can't even get a decent hamburger to the table?
After finishing my (out of the bag..) salad. I tried to eat my, now cold, "steak". Obviously an ungraded piece of cheap steak, full of fat and gristle. It was a joke. Undoubtedly, the worst piece of $34 steak I've ever had.
Will I ever eat at River House... Nope. If I want to drop $50 on a dinner I want it to be at least as good, preferably better... than what I can prepare at home. Save your money and find a better restaurant.
One of the things people had told me about the restaurant was how much money the owners had spent on creating it. It really was a disappointment, a nice venue with literally lousy food. They should have spent a little more time on staff training, chef training and simple courtesy. All of which tells me to go elsewhere.
To top it all off, we paid our bill and were just about to exit the rear door when a waitress stopped us to say we had been given the wrong bill... It took 10 minutes of them talking to each other, while we waited and waited for them to fix the issue. When it was all over we had to pay an additional$10 or so. This would NEVER happen at a restaurant I've ever visited. Make everyone wait around while you guys try to figure out what happened, for a measly $10. Doesn't say much about how you respect your customer's time. Shame on you! That alone is enough for me to eat elsewhere, in the future. read more