Woodfire Grille — Local services in Northwood

I waited 45+ minutes for a steak I ordered medium and it arrived medium rare. After 25 minutes and several reassurances from the bartender that it was, "coming right up" I saw her go back to the kitchen and come back out looking concerned so I knew something was up. I asked her if there was any sign of the steak and she said, "they just finished with those 6-tops so they're working on yours now." which I took to mean they had just finally put it on the grill. I waited another 20 minutes and finally the food came out and sure enough the steak looked like it had been on the grill for 10 minutes at most.

The entire Diamond Jo casino is chronically understaffed and I feel for the people working there so I didn't even want to complain, I just wanted my steak cooked a bit more. I showed the bartender the steak and asked if it could be put back on the grill for a few minutes. She said, "I'll have a manager come out and talk to you." which is definitely NOT what I wanted. The manager came out and proceeded to tell me that the time I waited was "pretty good for tonight," which did not help my mood. She said they couldn't put the steak back on the grill due to food safety rules, so all she could offer was to cook another steak. At this point I had eaten poutine as an appetizer and a lot of sides and bread because i was so hungry, so I declined an additional steak. She did comp the steak and a glass of wine which I appreciated.

The poutine was also very below average. It was described as ""parmesan herb fries, cheese curds, bourdelaise". The fries had barely any parmesan or herbs on them, the "cheese curds" were tiny cubes of raw flavorless white cheese that in no way should have been described as "curds", and it was covered in a mostly flavorless brown gravy.

It's too bad because the restaurant is a nice place and after a long day of sportsbooking and the craps table I was looking forward to a nice steak dinner. I hope they can get the place adequately staffed up so these incidents...

Since it doesn't appear that the Casino will let a page for the Kitchen Buffet appear on google maps for reviews, even after it has specifically been requested, I will leave my review here as part of my review for Woodfire Grille which is ridiculously overpriced.

Kitchen Buffet is 100% awful. DO NOT EAT THERE! I don't even know where to start. The dining room managers there are extremely lazy and the servers don't appear to make enough money to care about their jobs and keeping customers happy. There are always dirty tables, no matter what time of day it is.

I dare anyone to go into that buffet 15 minutes before close and tell me that the food looks good.

It is pathetic and sad that the casino allows that buffet to continue operating under the current restaurant management. No one seems to care. I've run buffets before and the amount of health codes being violated daily there are just insane. Serving utensils should never be kept in the food under heat lamps... ever.

The casino does seem to care about keeping the buffet off Google Maps enough to try and claim it is not a separate restaurant... Hmmmm. Why could that be? Oh, because they know that the reviews of the buffet will all be...

Made two person reservations for 9:30. We were not seated till closer to 10. The restaurant was not busy at all. We then we’re not greeted by our waiter for another 15 minutes. When we ordered drinks we also ordered food. Another 10 minutes we received water and the “ bread”, which were kings Hawaiian rolls. Drinks came in, and were not correctly mixed which let to a very awful cocktail. Our appetizer of $16 calamari was rubber breaded. Think fish stick! The table next to us also returned theres due to the same issue. They finally told the kitchen to cancel their order and needed to leave. An hour had gone by before any mention of food would come out. We finally received our meal and thankfully the rib eye was cooked a beautiful rare and walleye was delicious. The. “mashed potatoes” were flakes. The “ maple honey carrots” were baby carrots with little flavor and cold. The $6 add of au gratin potatoes were dry and less then visually pleasing. The manager was present but never stopped at any table to apologize for delays, the bar tender was the only person to offer us any assistance. We didn’t leave till...