This may be the most spectacular collection of self-inflicted hospitality wounds I have ever seen…read moreat a restaurant.
We had six people, including family visiting from Europe and Asia who, understandably, wanted to sit together. There was a booth where all six of us could comfortably fit. Cherry Creek Grill nevertheless refused to seat more than five people at a table because, we were told, food and service quality would suffer.
That is a fairly astonishing admission of incompetence.
Somehow every taqueria, neighborhood restaurant, and Michelin-starred dining room has figured out how to serve tables of six, eight, or ten people. Cherry Creek Grill is apparently drawing the line at five and telling you it is because the restaurant cannot maintain its standards beyond that.
The solution to that problem, other than just gaining the competence to serve six people, would be to let us decide whether we are willing to accept lower food and service quality in exchange for sitting together. Instead, we got to discover the rule after arriving and were split up.
But fine. They have planted the flag. Five is the number at which Cherry Creek Grill can provide the quality of service it is so concerned about protecting.
Except it couldn't.
Sandwiches came out at different times and different temperatures, none particularly hot. The fries were definitely not freshly made. One French dip came without the requested horseradish despite the request having been specifically confirmed. A couple at the table asked to split something and, rather than split-plate it, the restaurant just brought the sandwich as-is. None of these is some catastrophic service failure by itself. Collectively, they are pretty funny from a restaurant that had just separated our family in the name of preserving service quality.
Then there are the rules.
We were told they bring one individual serving of dipping sauce per table, apparently regardless of how many orders of fries are being shared at that table. I still do not understand why this needed to be a policy.
They also apparently keep an artichoke dish on the menu year-round despite frequently not having it available.
And Cherry Creek Grill has a dress code banning things like hats and team jerseys, which feels bizarrely out of step with both Denver and what the restaurant actually is. This is lunch in a Cherry Creek shopping district at a restaurant serving burgers, sandwiches, fries, and rotisserie chicken. Plenty of substantially more ambitious restaurants in this city somehow survive the occasional baseball cap.
My Kölsch was also poured incorrectly, which is minor, but by this point felt almost on theme.
The food itself was mostly just meh. My rotisserie lamb sandwich is separately called out on the menu as a limited item and was in no meaningful way special. The French dip was properly made. Nothing was awful, but nothing about the meal came close to justifying the amount of pretension surrounding it.
I want to be clear that our waitress was pleasant, and I do not blame her for any of this. In fact, she gave us the funniest moment of the meal. We joked that the next time our overseas family was all together there would probably be a new baby and asked whether the baby would count toward the five-person limit.
She deadpanned, apparently not getting that we were stating what we assumed to be an absurd joke, that yes, the baby would count.
So Cherry Creek Grill at least gave our family a new inside joke.
Hospitality should generally be about making it easier for people to enjoy a meal together. Cherry Creek Grill seems to have built an impressive number of rules around doing the opposite, while simultaneously failing to deliver the food and service quality those rules are supposedly protecting.
*Additional note my wife reminded me of, we regularly ate here with 6 or more people at a single table in the past when it was much better.
