Freehouse — Restaurant in Berkeley

I never leave reviews for a restaurant where I have had a poor experience because I simply just don’t go back. (However in this case I am making an exception). I have never been to any establishment where the service was so poor, so overwhelmed, incompetent and extremely disorganized in my life. For example, when we entered the restaurant, we were told to “seat ourselves”. So we went out to the back patio, sat down, and waited, and waited, and waited. 35 minutes passed until we were approached by a waitress with a single menu as the waitress said they “didn’t have enough to go around”. No biggie. But there were customers that had waited longer than us and were obviously upset seeing us get service, yet there were other customers we saw who came 10-15 minutes later us that had already had their orders taken.

During our wait, I watched a waiter (one of just two wait-staff serving over 40 + customers I counted seated in the patio area) actually bump into a customer who was returning to her seat causing the customer to spill her drink all over her table, and the waiter just walked away. Her and her husband were dumbfounded. She finally got up to go to the bar to get a replacement drink a few minutes later, but I felt so bad for them that I actually went to the bar, got a towel and came out to clean the table. By then over an hour had passed and we still hadn’t received our food, so when we finally got our waiter’s attention to inquire about our meals, he said he “lost his tickets” and needed to find out what our orders were again. And the only way we could receive any refills on our beverages was to go into the bar area and order them ourselves.

Maybe this was just a confluence of multiple mistakes, but staffing a restaurant with 2 bartenders and two wait-staffers with nearly 100 customers was inexplicable. At least when we received our food it tasted good, hence...

Decent food and beer in a historic room (2/5 Green Stars) I’ve been to the Free House a few times and always find it to be fine. It seems like it needs a little tweaking to make it really work. For a bar next to campus, I think they should lower their beer prices a bit. They have an interesting selection but the mark up seems a bit steep. They used to make a really good black bean burger but replaced it with a veggie patty made mostly from red quinoa and beets ($12, incl fries). It was interesting, but missed the mark for me. Bring back the black bean burger! This used to be the meeting spot for the Free Speech Movement, so take a moment to check out the photos on the walls.

I’m also giving them 2/5 Green Stars for social and environmental impact, based on these reasons: • Decent selection of local craft beer • The menu is pretty meat-centered • Almost no info on ingredient sourcing or...

I visited last Friday for dinner, and I had a good experience, although there are things I would suggest. The service was excellent, and almost immediately after I sat myself down a server came to take my order, and was very friendly yet professional. For dinner, I ordered the Fried Chicken sandwich with garlic fries, as well as the BBQ wings. The wings were excellent, and really nice and moist, and a great BBQ sauce. However, while the actual chicken patty in the sandwich was light and crispy, it was a bit bland, as well as the fries, which I thought were badly balanced and a little too soft, with all the garlic sort of concentrated near the center of the actual basket. For a dish that is definitely on the more expensive side, I have to say I was a little...