Oak — Restaurant in Boulder

We stopped at Oak on 8/29/19 due to positive reviews and its proximity to the Pearl Street Mall. We wanted a nice dinner before continuing on our family road trip to Badlands, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, etc. We knew there probably wouldn't be as many nice restaurant options on the road. Oak was pretty full on a Friday evening at ~8:30p but not so packed that we had to wait. We were seated immediately at a nice table by the window. That's where things got derailed. Our waitress didn't introduce herself or come by our table for a good 15 minutes. We were served water by the bus staff and we waited and waited. Meanwhile, a table seated at least 10 minutes after us got immediate attention from their waiter, including water, bread and salted butter, and menu recommendations with a smile. The same waiter also served another adjacent table and appeared attentive and friendly. Our waitress, however, when she finally showed up, had a smirk/sour face. I don't recall her name (she probably didn't tell us her name for obvious reasons) but she was caucasian, short, brown hair, and wore a scarf on her head. As it turned out, she had walked past our table a few times and didn't make any eye contact so I had no idea she was our waitress. Immediately, I was put off. The first thing she said was to explain in an unfriendly/condescending tone that we needed to order all our food at once & that if we weren't 100% ready she was going to leave and come back when we were. So rude. We were hungry and it was late and had about 4 dishes decided on already. We wanted a recommendation on maybe 1 more pasta dish. She ignored what I asked and tried to convince us to get a family plate fish dish instead. She took our order and left. That was the last time we saw her, at least until close to the end of our meal. I had to ask the person delivering our salad for bread. Even the friendly waiter next-door checked on us before our own waitress did. I don't know if this is a typical set up for this restaurant but all the food was delivered by a rotation of different staff members while our waitress continued to avoid eye contact throughout the night. I watched her from afar and she appeared to spend time with 1 or 2 other tables closer to the exit. I doubt she was friendly but at least she gave those other patrons attention. When our waitress finally did show up, she noticed we were out of water. She poured what was remaining into my son's or husband's cup, left, and came back with a full bottle. She started to tip the bottle as if she was going to fill our glasses, hesitated, then decided mid-motion to instead set the bottle on the table for us to pour ourselves and walked away. Seriously? So unprofessional. We spent over $150 on a meal (not including tip) and expected a little better service. Even my kids started laughing at the waitress and her combination of rudeness and ineptitude. I didn't want to leave a tip at all but my husband left over 20% since tips were likely to be shared among the staff. In hindsight, I think everyone on the staff knew we were getting bad service, which is why they all seemed to step in to help. The food overall was ok (hanger steak was good; calamari dish was very light on the calimari, pastas & other dishes--which I don't even remember--were either unremarkable or mixed flavors that didn't work together). BUT we all agreed the kale salad was the best we'd had and the bread & salted butter was nice. I'm giving 2 stars instead of 1 bc (1) I know not all the wait staff are as bad as our waitress---though I hold management accountable for employing someone so horrible--and (2) because they had some good dishes. In closing, I don't know what the waitress's problem was but we did feel a bit singled out from the beginning. Could it have something to do with the fact we were the only non-white customers in the entire restaurant? All we did was sit down before we were met with attitude and condescension. I'm throwing that (racism) out there in case someone else has the same or...

My overall grade for this experience is: B+

Location is very convenient and the facilities are large and well situated. There's a wood-fired oven and a large Santa Maria grill and the menu offers great choices.

Drinks - we started with some cocktails and wine - the cocktail selections were great - I ordered a dirty martini which was very tasty. One of the members in our party was asking about some different types of white wines and the server was trying to describe some of their choices since they didn't have an Albariño that she requested. When describing the sauvignon blancs from New Zealand, the server oddly referred to them as "Cat Lady wine" - I'm not sure what he meant by that, but I would say that my reaction is pretty in line with the majority of folks would find that "odd" to say the least. As a wine lover of all types of wine, some of the nicest sauvignon blancs from New Zealand have been crisp and great to drink. Perhaps the establishment might find a way to have their servers describe their wine list in a better light.

Service - As we've been in Colorado for a few days now, our friends that live here that we came to visit have begun to speak more and more about the service disparity between Colorado and the midwest where we currently live. There seems to be a recurring theme as we dine in Colorado - the service is distinctly "slower" to say the least versus the midwest dining experience. Our friends who live here seem to be coming to terms with the fact that one must go to someplace like Flagstaff - where the service is impeccable. I'll just chalk this up to: "Colorado service".

Food - Starters included chicken liver pate - which was absolutely delicious, but the "ratio" of pate to bread was way off. A ton of bread and 'some' pate. Either tone down the bread to match the pate amount, or up the pate amount. My strong vote is to increase the pate portion. We also had the apple and kale salad which everyone liked. I myself am not a fan of kale, but it was "fine". The best thing we had for starters was the roasted Spanish octopus. While the best tasting, it came really late after we had finished all the other appetizers. "Colorado service".

For main courses, we had scallops, roasted chicken and the green chili pork shoulder. Let's start with the scallops - delicious - highly recommended. Roast chicken - delicious, but painfully dry - ask your server if you order it to make sure they don't leave it in the oven too long. Then came the pork shoulder - while it's probably some of the tastes and juiciest pork shoulder (served with corn tortillas) - the portion seems to be about 1/2 of a pork shoulder. These portions - could have fed the entire table of 6 people and then some. When I ordered the dish, the server did say that it was a large portion, but wow. Really - they can literally cut this in half and still feed at least 3 people

Dessert - we ordered both the panna cotta and the chocolate cobbler. Delicious on both fronts. Wish there were more choices, but great choices.

Overall a great place for dinner with a group - looking for great drinks albeit a small wine choice, great food and great dessert, with...

An extremely poor experience in multiple ways.

My girlfriend brought me here for my birthday; I had marked Oak on my list of places I really wanted to go to and so was pleasantly surprised when told.

However, I knew things were going wrong when we selected the grilled octopus and got a tiny few cuts of octopus with a giant slab of prosciutto draped over it over a bed of almost cold mashed potatoes. Nothing in the ingredients matched; it was a terribly conceptualized recipe served literally as though made for another table an hour before and reused.

We asked for Pellegrino and were served house sparkling which is fine (until you read what happened later!).

I ordered the lamb which came out as the most embarrassing and least delicious dish I’ve seen for quite some time. Imagine taking good Colorado lamb and chopping it up and cooking it so long that it looks like the meat from a Philly cheesesteak, I mean it looked just like cheap cheesesteak meat. To top it off, it was so salted neither of us could palate it. Destroying the lamb was an egregious crime no legitimate chef should commit.

My girlfriend had the sweet potato gnocchi and it was good enough. I don’t like sweet potatoes but this was better than anything that touched my lips at Oak.

Seeing that I was not enjoying either of my dishes, they comped the cold mashed potato prosciutto dish that had a couple flakes of octopus, but stopped there and made no mention of the lamb I couldn’t eat.

As a consolation, the server (very nice fellow who doesn’t seem to have worked in the industry long and was quite nervous all night) brought us over one of those huge Pellegrino bottles near the end of our meal. This was quite unexpected for one because they claimed to not offer it, and two because we were almost done dining and couldn't possibly finish it.

To top it all off, we had an 8pm reservation and so were there at the end of the night. The bartender started CLEANING THE BAR WITH BLEACH! We couldn’t stand the fumes. We flagged the manager over and asked for our bill immediately because of the smell. He admitted it was a bit strong! This is extremely confusing to me for a supposed fine dining experience, especially when the manager could recognize there were fumes.

There were several other blunders like them forgetting my girlfriend had ordered a birthday dessert and such, they actually brought out and were filling the largest trash can I’ve ever seen (we were looking for Oscar the Grouch!) with bits of meat that came from what looked like a large rotisserie, etc.

Something happened to this restaurant not to mention Covid (which I understand is really difficult) and the multiple chef and menu changes changes (always a bad sign). It was an expensive and regrettable experience. I will never go back under this ownership and...