Tent City Taphouse — Restaurant in Alaska

Tent City Taphouse, as of this review, is a newly opened restaurant in Downtown Anchorage next to the 5th Avenue Mall. It is a local restaurant that solely serves Alaskan beers. While I would like to give Tent City Taphouse a great rating, I just didn't have that great of an experience.

Let's talk about the positives first. The food and beers were good. My party ordered the downtown burger and the salmon alaskana as our main dishes and an appetizer of some garlic cilantro duck fat fries. According to my friend, the beer selection was vast (24 different beers on tap) and he couldn't really choose so he got 2 flights for a total of 8 different beers. According to him, none of them were bad -- though he naturally enjoyed some more than others.

As for the food, the burger itself was amazing. I got a medium rare burger and I enjoyed every bite of it. It had a well toasted bun with a crisp on the outside and a soft interior. The meat itself was thick, but not too thick, and juicy. They also had mushrooms, some type of vegetable, and a sweet sauce that complimented the entire burger. Overall, one of the best burgers I have ever had. The fries that came with it weren't anything special, sadly. The salmon alaskana was good, but nothing special. It had a good flavor, but I felt like I could have made something similar to it at home.

With that, let's go to the negatives. When we arrived, the place wasn't very full (perhaps 1/4 full), but it got full quickly with a line as well. I felt like they didn't really have proper COVID precautions as people were packed together. In fact, the table behind me was definitely less than 6 feet away; if I turned around in my chair, I could barely reach my hand out and it would touch them. Secondly, the wait time for our appetizer was terribly long. My friend was able to finish his first flight of beers and receive his second flight before the appetizer came out even though he said he was pacing himself. It took over 30 minutes for our fries to come out. (To accurately measure time, I took a picture of his first flight and Google has a timestamp of when it happened so I used that to know). Lastly, the garlic cilantro duck fat fries themselves were disappointing as well. I expected some type of garlic flavor or a difference in taste with the duck fat fries compared to the regular fries included with the burger; however, it all tasted the same. In fact, I really didn't taste any garlic flavor in the fries which is surprising since it is a very potent flavor.

Overall, I thought a rating of 3.5 would be fair; however, since Google doesn't do half a star, I thought my experience would be closer to a 3 than 4. I will say that I am neutral about the restaurant. If they followed better COVID protocol and didn't take such a long time for my food to come out, I think it would be a stellar place where I would come back (occasionally though since I thought the prices were a bit on the...

We will not be coming back to this restaurant due to the worst experience that we had sadly, this is the only worst experience we had in Anchorage! (Anchorage locals) We had lunch here today and the atmosphere was very unwelcoming. The service could use work as well as the food. When we had gotten there it was 1:30 and left at 3:20 we had to wait for a table which was not a problem, but when we’re were seated it was a different story. We didn’t get service until 20 minutes after being seated although menus were given right when we were seated. We sat downstairs by the window. By the time our waiter had came to take our order we were ready. We got the artichoke and scallop dip, the classic burger and the downtown burger. We waited about an hour making eye contact with our waiter as well as other employees there while waiting. Although asked if we would like more water we only received one cup of water each (that was 30 minutes into the hour waiting for our food, we were not asked if we would like more water after receiving our food). There were a lot of people in the restaurant so we kind of got why the food was taking so long. We were the first people to be sat but had gotten our food mostly after everyone. Our waiter kept checking to see if our food had been ready a couple of times but never really got back to us, our waiter wasn’t even the one bringing us our food. It was after I had made eye contact with the waiter that had seated us for him to bring us our starter and exactly one minute after we had gotten our burgers. The classic burgers patty was very dry and flavorless but the flavor of the garlic mayo was over powering and over all very heavy. The artichoke and you scallop dip was also very heavy and greasy (which can be expected). The downtown burgers bread was hard and the patty again was flavorless but the mushrooms were very good. When we were finished with our food, we were ready to get out of there. When we had asked for the check, it took us 20 minutes to decide to get up and go to the counter and asked another waiter to ask our waiter to bring us our check. After we had asked for our check once again she finally decided to just take our card without telling us how much our bill was , when our waiter got back with our receipt she had had many receipts and...

There is nothing special about this place. It used to be Crush before Covid which had a really nice atmosphere. First of all THE NAME! 🤦🏻‍♀️ Anchorage, has an issue with homelessness, and the words “tent city” has been used in reference to homeless locations in the past. I really don’t know how they managed to equate the name with something that would inspire people to gather.

The atmosphere is in mundane colors of black and white. Boring. The music was low volume (which is generally desirable) and extremely random. Nothing memorable, except by the end of the evening 8:30pm they had techno music playing.

The wooden high top tables are basic and plentiful for the most part with a couple of standard tables located directly across from the bar. I guess there is seating upstairs, but the party I was with were seated near the open doors downstairs.

This is an ale tap bar, so if you’re looking for that, you will find a nice variety here. They do not serve hard liquor here. Their food fair is adequate, at best. Heavy on the sauce for appetizers of chicken and also the vegetable sides that come with the main dish. Was not impressed with the scallop spinach artichoke appetizer I ordered. The consistency was like a blob of sour cream or Boursin with the little of the main ingredients there. Every half a dozen bites, I would taste a scallop. The cheese on top was thick and hard and the entire dish got quickly cold. Another guest at the table, barely touched her salmon appetizer, as she said it grew too cold quickly. The presentation was nice, with naan on the side. Overall, this is probably the least favorite version of this ever popular spinach artichoke dish.

The wait staff was energetic and attentive. Very welcoming and the best thing going for...