Tap & Barrel • Bridges — Restaurant in Vancouver

"By Owner" message

["Tap & Barrel Bridges merges Bridges’ legacy with Tap & Barrel’s philosophies, ..... Our menu features next level comfort food …… with a Tap & Barrel twist."]

Visiting from Toronto, we were craving Top & Barrel for a while, typically for its views and high standard food reviews. We were likely looking forward to have and share “next level comfort food”. Unfortunately, our meal experiences were mediocre and some dishes were disappointing and coating with overly salty, leaving much to be desired in terms of "next level comfort food".

CALABRIAN CHILI & GARLIC PRAWNS Prawns are supposed to be bigger, but it seemed more like the size of shrimp. Though lacking in calabrian chili, the sauce wasn’t bad.

FRIED CHICKEN MAC & CHEESE Fancier Kraft Dinner with extra bacon - the fried chicken was dried and overcooked, but the pasta itself was pretty standard comfort food.

PESTO PRAWN PIZZA At first glance, the pizza looked okay, but there was very little pesto cream and the prawn size was small. The crust was both super thin and doughy. Overall, the pizza was not something to be impressed about.

PORCINI CRUSTED BEEF DIP Don't know whether inflation has really made the difference or not? With this food price tag, this dish was served with the 1/2 baguette (a long, narrow loaf of French bread).

FISH & CHIPS This beer-battered cod fish lacked with its desired flakiness level and the batter coated on rather thick and then overfried. A kind of frozen cod you could find at regular supermarket. The fries and coleslaw were average, with the overall dish not exactly hitting the mark.

• CREOLE STEAK 7oz SIRLOIN* Asked for "Blue" on my 7oz sirloin steak, however, the steak was not well worth waiting. The steak came medium rare and was over seared and had a dry, tougher texture. ..

From the creole butter on top of the steak to the roasted garlic mashed potato, the dish was overpowered with salt and I could taste nothing else.

The dish was served with ‘seasonal vegetables’ - in this case, it was dry, tough and unchewable "asparagus" (I found comparison photos from other reviews, it’s a pretty noticeable difference). I guess there are so many seasonal vegetables out there, but this seasonal asparagus was frankly quite disappointing. Even I’m not a professional cook, but I won’t pick this vegetable whilst in the supermarket just based on its texture.

I guess I have to end my review here. Otherwise, I will be on black-list of Tap & Barrel and among other restaurants... Haha... a customer from Toronto... See you...

[ P.S.  To the Owner(s) …

I hope you take a negative review with stride and look at this as an opportunity to correct a restaurant's flaws.  As an owner(s), you have replied to every single customer reviews, however, it's disappointing that no action is made and taken in order to make improvements.. The food looks good at a glance but lacks quality. If you look at the picture in the past reviews and/or even from pictures on your online menu, there's a lot of delicious-looking foods in the past, but we sadly couldn’t enjoy much of...

I’m not quite sure why this place has 4 stars because frankly my experience did not reflect that. Read on to see why.

We came for dinner and we didn’t wait too long, perfect. Front staff was friendly. Got sat down, waited 10 mins, someone brought us our water (not our server), we ordered our drinks. Waited another 20 mins, bartender brought our drinks. Our server did not greet us yet (in the end, they never did). We asked the bartender who our server was and the bartender ended up taking our order (which he just told the server and the server punched it in). We see our server walk around us, greet other guests (that got sat after us) and helped every other table around us. The first time our server spoke to us, was to ask us how the food was 10 mins after we started eating, which was super awkward. Try to flag someone down so we could talk to the manager, too difficult to do, we were fed up, and paid our bill digitally (thank you for that option) and left.

Food was mediocre. I had the truffle onion burger with fries, and it was good but not amazing. The flight of beer was refreshing.

And the Peppercorn steak, was the worst we had. I would never order a steak from here again seeing the price, the cut and lack of taste. They also don’t have alternative veggies besides the seasonal. We asked for double mashed instead (don’t like the asparagus, thought to explain the picture).

TLDR: service was terrible, food was mediocre for the price, I wouldn’t go back again unfortunately. If you want a view, I’d recommend another restaurant on Granville.

Other notes: We visited on a busy Tuesday night, the place was pretty much full and alive. Great vibes and I great accommodation for large groups (I assume because I saw many). There was a line but got sat quickly because we opted for indoor seating. 20-25 min wait for outdoor seating on a Tuesday...

This was a few months back, me and my boyfriend wanted to do a quick date and bite and saw this beautiful location for Tap and Barrel. There was no wait and got seated quickly, we got a beautiful seat along the water during the sunset and watched a wedding happen above us. When we sat we waited around 15 minutes for our server to greet, she then didn’t take a drink order and left us hanging for even longer. Once we got a drink order in we were on a little time crunch so we ordered our food at the same time. We waited around 30 minutes for our drinks to arrive. (I get it they were busy, but there were empty tables around us it couldn’t have been super busy. (As someone who works in a fast place restaurant like so beside the stadiums and theatres downtown.) she never once checked to see if we got our drinks, and didn’t acknowledge us for around an hour later when our food arrived. (Yes it took an hour) our food came after so so long we weren’t even interested in eating there anymore nor did we have the time to eat there anymore. We immediately asked for the bill and didn’t get to eat a bite of our food. Atleast she was quick with one thing, the bill. She immediately came back with the bill but this ruined our experience even more. She created conversation only while paying and it was only with my boyfriend sitting across. She was showing him astrology apps on her phone not including me in the conversation and disregarded that we had bad service in the first place. When we took the food home it was absolutely delicious and so was the environment but definitely not worth waiting 30 minutes for a beer and an hour for the food with no interactions from our server. Had hopes because of such good reviews and...