Red's Place — Restaurant in City of Ithaca

Great Burgers! Had to get that out of the way. Really nice salads with several options. Decent tap selection and one of the better liquor selections in town (best for a restaurant). The menu also offers several cocktails and you're welcome to suggest your own. Plenty of bar seating and both booths and tables inside. They also offer outdoor seating when the weather allows. The outdoor seating is pretty much a larger sidewalk right on Aurora - watch the world go by, but sometimes there's a bit of traffic.

The fries are the thicker style and I don't usually like that, but they're pretty good. They've been cooked right every time I've had them (prob too many) - they also offer 'tadder-tots' and I usually go for those. When I want to do better, they offer a really nice side salad as an option. The 'Clam Down' is a huge step up for their take on steamed clams. Steamed in a white wine / garlic / butter /house seasonings and dumped in a big metal bowl, served with a really nice toasted ciabatta bread those loves to soak up the "clam soup". As a warning; you may fight off vampires for the rest of the evening from the garlic. Worth it! It's also priced what everyone else does just steaming them.

Ok, back to those burgers. Tied for my favorite in town and worth the stop in for these alone. They have a few regular options on the menu and a monthly special that makes you stop at least that often. The last monthly for me was 1/2 patty with a pile of brisket, candied jalapeños, melted cheddar, fried onion ring and their own BBQ sauce... AMAZING! The standard "Aurora street burger' and a great bacon cheese burger'. Thick 1/2 that's always juicy and cooked perfectly. A quality beef and always delicious. But treat yourself to an adventure and look further down the list for something a little different - "The PB & Jealousy burger". Yes, it's what you think - a peanut butter spread on the top bun and jelly on the bottom - it just... works. It's not an every day burger, but one you have to try. My only change would be to have a jalapeño raspberry like option for the jelly - that would make it just a little better.

Overall - great burgers, and the rest of the menu (when I've tried to not have a burger) is pretty good. Fantastic, fresh and inventive salads. A bar that stands on it's own to stop and quench your thirst. Friendly staff and really great bartenders.

One of the best restaurants in...

My family and I ate at this establishment a few days ago based off recommendation. When we arrived, we were seated, ordered drinks (they took a while to arrive), then ordered food. The waitress was a bit short with her responses while ordering, but we cut her a break as serving can be quite stressful at times. However, after explaining the kitchen and bar were closed, we asked for pay for our drinks and for them to just be brought as we drank, rather than them getting warm sitting at our table. This is where the difficulty with our waitress began in our opinion, because she brought the drinks regardless. We recognized she was in a hurry to leave and close, so we asked for the check and if we could take the beer we purchased to go (this was denied, understandably as this could be restaurant policy) so she could begin closing, and even tipped 30% from our bill. After we paid the bill, she went into the kitchen and didn’t serve us the rest of the time. One of the members of our party, went back and stood there attempting to get someone’s attention for a fountain drink (soda) refill. Our waitress peaked through the kitchen door a few times, before coming and serving a grown man his drink in a children’s cup. Mind you our party was being as respectful as we possibly could while being treated like this. The final straw was about 5 minutes after the children’s cup situation, where the waitress came, and took a salad right from under one of the members of our party. At this point we walked outside and discussed what we should do. We concluded that we should attempt to talk to our waitress and explain that her treatment of our party was not acceptable for restaurant service. She then insulted us with phrases like “oh just have another drink” with attitude, at a bar (none of us were anywhere near drunk). Clearly the message of her poor service, for such a tip especially, wasn’t understood. We asked for her name and who the manager was, then walked back outside to leave. As we stood outside and gathered ourselves, the waitress came out and half-heartedly apologized because the manager told her to, then went back in to continue disrespectfully gossiping about our party. This treatment is clearly deserving of much more than this review, but for now we are hoping this review reaches the right people so this type of service doesn’t continue at this...

We didn’t even get to sit. The hostess was SO RUDE . I couldn’t even believe it was really happening. We had driven 4 hours to get to Ithaca. We were starving and went to reds- 25 minute wait- not bad! We got drinks at the bar and waited patiently. After 30 minutes had passed, we noticed 4 open tables. One- shortly after - the servers came out and started rolling silverware on. We have over 10 years experience in restaurant business so we KNOW this is unacceptable. When I KINDLY asked the hostess about the status of our table, she quickly and rudely dismissed us proclaiming that she needed to clean all the tables down and needed more time- about 10 minutes more. However, they were already clean and set . three of them . When She notices this, she ROLLS HER EYES and says she will look next on the list- we were next- there was no one else in there. But she kept walking around the restaurant instead of seating us. When I human to human asked her “don’t you think it’s strange that your staff will take a table to roll silverware instead of seating a willing to pay customer ?” And again rudely says “this is what management does. What do you want ? Me to talk to them?” I said “yes because I have a feeling if they knew customers were waiting then they would want us to eat and give money” so she goes over to the other workers and they look at me and LAUGH. I can’t possibly make this up. Look at my other reviews - I never review for a bad way. But realizing there IS no management, we decided to leave because if we can’t even get seated with 4 empty tables, then I can’t imagine how awful the service would have been. Again- This young hostess was SO RUDE. She didn’t care if Reds made money or not. She didn’t really care much about...