"My experience here left me quite bewildered: I have watched this place open with great fanfare, I love the aesthetics of the space, and I enjoy greatly the fact that the menu is different than most other things around town.I also would like to revisit this place in the future as I suspect my experience may have been a rare off moment, but I remain skeptical and must report honestly, blindfolded to anything but the food itself. So, I will be returning here to give this place a second chance at some point, because I think that's only fair. I have heard from a few different people from very different spheres of my life things that do line up with my experience, though.So, what are the issues here? Let me start with what I like: the aforementioned aesthetics, the different dishes one may get here, and the beer selection skews European, and as someone who has just returned from a week in Germany, I very highly appreciate that. I felt the service was also excellent and the staff are very kind and on top of things.That being said, I was served cold food. A panini partially warm, partially cold served with half warm half cold fries is akin to playing Russian roulette in the food world. Was it bad? No, I would not use that word in any sense, but I would classify it as fine'. Fine isn't bad but isn't good or great either; the presentation was the most interesting thing about the dish.Everything on the menu looks and sounds great, so I picked at random, and this is what we got. The bread was not soggy, nor was it too dry and the cheese was beautifully melted, but if you asked me what else was supposed to be on this particular item aside from bread and cheese, I'd have to review the menu to tell you. To be fair, for these things it could just be my palate at the point in time in which I had the food, but that doesn't excuse lukewarm food.Further, at the price point it is at, one would expect that the food is lights out every time, from the simplest items on the menu to the most extravagant. I am a very firm believer that if you can' nail the simple things, then nothing else really matters. I have yet to find anyone who can make a compelling argument to dispel this idea.The cocktail I had sort of fell into this same realm of fine, but I'd say it was maybe a step above. On the contrary, the only lavender I experienced was the color, and the only mint involved was as a garnish. Both these items are listed in the description of the drink itself, though it does not explicitly state as flavors, so I guess technically its fine. The drink simply lacked any layering or blending and synthesis; just a vague sense of some sort of flavor being there.Like I stated at the beginning, I want to try this again and see if maybe something unusual was afoot. There were some other things happening that imbued a sort of muted chaos on the restaurant while I was there or maybe something odd was happening with my palate. I think it would be fair to do that and if things are truly different, update the review. But is also fair to judge things as they happened no matter the extenuating circumstances.Shepherd's Pie, Beef Wellington, and the Fish and Chips may be well done, but what I will come back to is, if you have something simple that you aren't going to be perfect at, why even put it on the menu, especially considering the price point of this restaurant, and what the positioning tells us about what sort of pedigree this restaurant wishes to be viewed with.There are places I like that other people perhaps don't as much from a perspective of taste and that, I believe is perfectly acceptable and I actually encourage that because it's honest. But being served well presented food that can't decide if it itself is warm, hot, or cold, is a technical issue, not one of taste.So, I would encourage people to go and try something here, but I wouldn't quite recommend it, or I would, cautiously, with the understanding that you may be left bewildered, wondering, is this it ."
