Blue LLama Jazz Club and Restaurant — Restaurant in Ann Arbor

Such a weird experience. First, read reviews about this place BEFORE going. There’s a trend, The Blue LLama bartender and musicians serve as a stark counter to their lacking dinner service and subpar food, served up at fine dining prices. You could easily hate this place or love it depending why you go… so read before committing!

Food Quality: 6.5/10. The ceviche shone brightly, but other dishes were merely average. I would describe our main courses as fine, but it’s the kind of food where you’d hope they had salt and pepper on the table to polish off the seasoning job. Not bad, just incredibly far from an over $500 meal.

Service: 2/10. The service was notably lacking.

Bartending: 10/10. Excellent drink preparation.

Live Music: 10/10. The musician performed exceptionally well.

Overall Experience: 3/10, but I was very excited about the, by the end, quite disastrous prix fixe menu.

Dining Policy: After ordering three prix fixe meals, we were informed that while we each would be paying for a side… their policy is to only serve ONE person a side per table even if everyone pays for the same meal. We’re talking a side dish that consists of roughly 1/6th of a sliced potato and cheese... nothing wildly expensive. Just so odd to be shady over a potato in a $500+ meal transaction. This was communicated to us after we thought our waiter was simply getting the sides… by the time he returned we were done with the main course. At which point we’re informed of said policy and to our confusion he also informed us that he didn’t like that policy and had them “already fire you a second one”. So, is the policy 2/3 of food ordered is provided, are you running low on potato’s, or did you simply forget?

Dessert Disappointment: They have 4 dessert options, we ordered 3. All 3 were incorrect, as in the wrong item. Completely guessing would have been closer to our order unfortunately. That said, they replaced all the desserts with the correct ones which at this point just added to the hilarity of the whole attempt at serving an up-scale prix fixe meal.

Additional Poor Service: We made two orders of $14 corn bread, that’s $14 each. Both came out not during our appetizers, not during our first side dish delivery, not during our main course, not during first incorrect desserts, but right before our second desert which if I recall correctly was after our random second side dish of potato’s (from earlier when we expected 3, got 1, but had a 2nd “fired” already.) Are you struggling to follow which course is the first, second, or third? Me too friend.

If The Experience Were Broken Down By Tips: 20% base starting point for average to even somewhat below average service. Deduct 10% for inadequate service Deduct 10-15% for a restrictive and poorly communicated side dish policy. Deduct 5-10% for incorrect desserts paired with literal “oops forgot about y’all again” timings such as cornbread between dessert attempts.

All of which would be fine but by the 5th mistake it starts to add up, and in the context of forking over $500+ it’s a bit jarring to experience. So, on a performance basis, I land on a net tip of negative 10%. Yikes. While we ended up providing a generous tip, leaving it felt almost cruel given the incredible live music performance. In another world there’s 0% tip left for the clown show dinner service and the musician walks out with a duffel bag of cash from her patrons, hopefully she gets a healthy slice 🙏.

Overall everyone was friendly and if this were a fraction of the price and you’re looking to relax through an unstructured dining experience then maybe? In this reality and at this price it’s simply missing the mark.

If they didn’t serve food this would legitimately be a 10/10 recommendation. The musicians were all absolutely cooking, and the bartender was throwing gasoline on it. Both made the night overall fantastic, but as far as the “restaurant” portion… BIG unquestionable, chuckling on the way out, level can’t recommend...

UPDATE:

I have to hand it to the Blue Llama staff— they went out of their way to address all concerns, and when we visited last night to see the Ellis Marsalis Quintet, it was a perfect evening. Food has gotten even better, service was outstanding, and the music incomparable.

Here is my old four star review:

I love this place. The acoustics and ambience are unparalleled. The food is magnificent if costly. The music bookings are without compare. Most of the waitstaff, especially Banu, are amazing.

I do have one concern which, if addressed, would easily lead me to go back and change my four stars to five. This evening we saw the 7 pm showing of Kevin Eubanks. The music was outstanding. However there was a table of four who were speaking quite loudly during all the music. I know that could happen, and a waiter or host could easily address such an occurrence and politely encourage the loud table to at least lower their voices somewhat.

This is what we asked for and would have expected. Instead, our waiter (who was not the marvelous Banu) told us that this is a restaurant not a theater and we should not expect anything different. I was a bit surprised. No, I thought, this is not a restaurant that happens to have some jazz music on the side. This is a jazz club (it’s in the name) that also happens to have food. The band performing was not a local group of semi professionals assembled to make pleasant noises to accompany our clinking dinnerware and conversation— this was the Kevin Eubanks quartet. Both Kevin and the $95 ticket price merited a more respectful environment that put the music first.

I only hope that our waiter was the problem, and that his rather rude response does not reflect this jazz club’s policies. That is certainly what I would like to believe. And he did make a number of errors that point in the direction. He did not offer us the champagne that was promised with our tickets. When we finally had to ask him about it at the end of our meal, he had the gall to ask us how much we paid for our tickets to make sure we merited it. Other guests received the promised champagne without needing to ask for it, and certainly withouthaving their story checked by the offending waiter.

Please tell me that your waiter is errant and that he does not represent the ethos...

I have to say, I used to love this place but unfortunately the last 2 times I’ve been it’s been really disappointing. The food used to be so good and I never had a bad serving experience until the last 2 visits. I thought the previous visit was an off night, maybe that they were short-staffed but after this last visit, and having the same waiter, it’s apparent it’s not just a bad night. Each time it took forever to get cocktails, we had to ask multiple times to get our water refilled, and if we hadn’t flagged down the server we never would have gotten another drink (last time we only had one drink because we truly never saw our server and we were asking other staff walking by for water and check)

We had the tasting menu this time and it was okay but I used to leave this place thinking WOW, that was amazing. I also don’t think the tasting menu was worth the price. Then, when we finally got our server’s attention for more drinks, two of the bottles of wine from their wine list we asked for were out of stock. It took them a very long time for someone to go look in the basement for an alternative, and then they brought us a completely different type of wine that had absolutely no similarities to the type of wine we wanted. We were also more than halfway done with our meal at this point.

The final thing that really just annoyed me after a bad second visit is that they charge a credit card processing fee. I can’t remember if this was always a thing, if it was it clearly didn’t bother me when the meal was actually worth it, but now it just seems a little ridiculous. You would think a restaurant/jazz club of this scale and with the prices they charge would not charge a processing fee.

Entertainment is great and it is still a fun atmosphere but I just don’t think it’s worth going...