Salt & Char — Restaurant in City of Saratoga Springs

It’s not often that I’m torn when reviewing a restaurant. I want to love Salt & Char- the menu is exciting, it is in a great location, the patio is spectacular- but there are several flaws that keep me from giving my highest recommendations. The five-star rating system has serious limitations, so let me break down the Salt & Char culinary and dining experience.

The Salt: The American Wagyu Cap Steak was every bit as delicious as I had hoped. It is a shining star on this menu. If you’ve never had this intensely marbled, flavorful cut of meat, it is a must-order. The simply prepared meat was cooked to perfection and gives meaning to the term “melt in your mouth.” A close second behind the Wagyu Cap Steak, was the Chateaubriand Steak for two. The steak was well-salted, spectacularly tender, and well-cooked in a brown butter sauce. The smoked scallops and bacon appetizer and Bloody Mary onion rings (hearty portion) and cheddar mashed potato sides were seasoned well and extremely flavorful. The wine menu is well curated and sure to have something for everyone. They also offer 3 oz and 5 oz pours of exclusive wines. Crusty, hot bread and salted butter served were delicious. The blood orange crème brulle and espresso are heavenly. I would come back just for a shot and a little bowl of this dessert. The staff is very friendly and servers work jointly to cover the basic needs of all tables.

The Char: The porterhouse is big and smoky, but otherwise, nothing to write home about. The greasy meat was comparable to something I could have cooked at home and was nowhere near worth the dollar value paid. Skip the crab fritters. They are the most flavorless and ill-conceived dish we had of the night. The appetizers and sides all could have benefitted from being served hotter. The ambience and décor of the dining room are disappointing. The drop ceilings and fold-out square-to-round tables felt more like an institutional cafeteria than a downtown hot spot or high-end restaurant. As my three family members and I were all wearing dark clothes, we requested dark colored napkins. The server was shocked by our “big ask” and returned with three black napkins that were “just laying around”- her words, not mine. After ordering a bottle of Sean Thackery Pleiades, the server brought a decanter to the table that had moisture in it. When I commented on it, she indicated that she saw the moisture when she brought the decanter to the table and it was probably from the night before. She returned to the table with a dried decanter and made a big show of telling the table that she had dried it extra. This entire interaction was off-putting. Our primary server had a very lax attitude and unrefined presentation that would have been better suited for a Seattle coffee bar than a $200/head restaurant.

Overall, Salt & Char needs the grindstone and polish. The food mostly hit the mark, but besides being friendly, their staff fell short of expectations and failed to make the dining experience a hospitable and memorable one. Without knowing Salt & Char has invested serious time into training their front-of-house staff, I am unlikely to dine here again- though, the Wagyu and crème brulle...

Many of the menu items at Salt & Char are the restaurant's take on "classics". However, the changes are certainly not improvements.

First the positive. The ambiance at the restaurant was nice. Our server was nice though seemed that he was trying to be one of those memorable servers and falling short of that mark considerably... The bread that they ship in was amazing and the coarse salted butter was a nice touch. The asparagus was delicious. The drinks were decent and the espresso martini was very good.

Now the negative. Let me first state that we were one of the first reservations in for the evening so the restaurant was NOT CROWDED. We ordered one of the more expensive dishes in the menu, the aged porterhouse for 2. I ordered it medium rare. When the steak came out after a very long time it was very over cooked. A 30+ ounce aged porterhouse that is your specialty should come out perfect EVERY TIME. At best this steak was medium well, more like well done with a bit of pink by the bone in the inside. The server dropped off the plate and gave a few comments on how he hoped we would enjoy our meal and went to leave. I caught him and refused the steak. There is no way I'm paying over $100 for a massively overcooked steak. They remade the steak and after a long wait AGAIN put an appropriately cooked streak in front of us. The steak was ok. Flavor was decent but the steak was NOT trimmed well and had a few lines of gristle running through it. I can certainly do BETTER at home even with grocery store meat. 1/5

As to the other parts of the meal...

Wedge salad was a "deconstructed wedge salad" with a pile of mostly limp radicchio that was very bitter. The bacon in the salad was the only bright point, I did not eat the salad. 1/5

Onion soup potato gratin was a pureed potato that was very under salted, the onions on top were flavorful and perhaps meant to balance out the rest? But the whole dish was luke warm at best. 2/5

The fried rice dish had some nice mushrooms in it, but SALT holy SALT! SAVE SOME FOR THE POTATOES! 1/5

Now for dessert, we ordered the Samoa cheesecake and the chocolate crème brûlée! Ahhh... Finally something to look forward to... Nope. After over 30 minutes of waiting and our server going by our table at least 5 times we caught him and told him to keep the desert that we had to leave. -5/5 for sheer disappointment!

We spent over 3 hours at the restaurant for a table of 2! Our bill was over $300 with tip for a truly sub...

I don’t write a lot of bad reviews for restaurants, but this place was not only a complete disappointment, we felt disrespected. We’ve wanted to try Salt and Char for years, so we were very excited to get a reservation on my birthday while we were in town. Our excitement ended about 5 seconds after entering the restaurant. We were immediately greeted with judgmental looks by the two gen z girls working the hostess stand and then they proceeded to sit us in the bar area. And as we sat there for the next 2.5 hours, it was made clear we were sat with the other folks deemed unworthy of sitting in the dining room. We were dressed up for a special occasion, and the people sitting around us literally had on shorts and baseball hats. I wish I would have read the reviews before going. It’s clear, based on our experience and many others shared in the reviews here, this place discriminates. Don’t know if it’s because I’m Asian or a lesbian, but I can say with certainty my wife and I were treated differently than the other patrons in the restaurant. The only reason they get more than 1 star is because the steaks were good. Worth $165? NO. And really, who cares how good the steak is if it’s served up with judgment and subpar service? Besides the steak, the rest of the food was average at best. The broccolini was so oily and black we couldn’t eat more than a bite. The peanut butter chocolate tort was the worst dessert we’ve ever had at an upscale restaurant. Didn’t even fit the description on the menu at all, and was essentially just chocolate covered pastry cream. Call me crazy but when I spend $500 on a special occasion dinner, I expect above average service and nice ambiance to go along with a tasty meal. We experienced none of those things. We were instead sat in a noisy bar surrounded by guys in baseball caps, and after our waiter took our order he let his assistant do the rest while he worked the dining room. At the end of this incredibly disappointing meal, my wife saw the manager walk through the bar and called him over (also something we never do). She shared with him that she felt it was inappropriate to sit a reservation in a noisy bar and his response was something like “I’ll make a note of your complaint.” So word of warning, if you’re someone who knows what discrimination feels like, you’ll want to avoid this place. And if you’re someone who doesn’t want to support a place that treats certain patrons as second class, don’t go to...