Vine Tavern & Eatery - Coralville — Restaurant in Coralville

Pretty upset with The Vine in Coralville. I went to school at the U of I and ate at the downtown Vine all of the time. It's a great dive bar atmosphere and the food is outstanding. My family moved back to the area recently and we typically go to the Coralville location purely due to size and having children, it's a pretty family friendly atmosphere. Unfortunately, the service is lacking. About 6 months ago, we had other family in town, so a total of 4 children and 4 adults and it wasn't really that busy of a night. We were seated right away, waited 20 minutes to get our drink order, then another 40 minutes to get our drinks. Never got approached during this time about our food orders, which we were ready for. Once the drinks came to the table, the server set them down and walked away, again not asking for our food orders. 20 minutes later, he finally came back and got our food orders, which we asked for the kids to be put in first so they could be fed. About an hour later he came to the table and apologized for the food taking so long, said the kids pizza takes a long time to cook. Again, there was no questions about refills on any of our empty drink glasses around the table. Eventually the food came out, we ate, and then waited another 20 minutes for our check after finishing.

I understand the serving world as I have served and bartended for about 10 years in my life, so I know sometimes the kitchen gets backed up or sections get filled. But multiple times our server was just standing and talking to other servers. Not sure if this server is still there, but I really hope not due to the lack of quality. Having kids at a restaurant for 3-4 hours is not a great experience.

About a month ago, I stopped to get a to-go order for myself and my wife. She always gets the Chicken Malibu and loves it. Her favorite part is the honey mustard that comes with the sandwich. I didn't look at the to-go order and headed home only to find there was no honey mustard on the sandwich or on the side. She basically was stuck eating a dry chicken sandwich. We ended up having to look up a easy to make home version just so the sandwich had something on it.

Yesterday, instead of making food for the Super Bowl (excuse me, the "Big Game") I ordered a few to-go items from some of my favorite places to snack on. I called multiple times to put my order in and never got an answer. I eventually just drove there to put my order in, then left to pick everything else up and made The Vine my last stop. I'm upset at myself as I should have looked at my order before leaving, but at this point I was ready to get home. When I got home, my order wasn't even right. I had ordered some boneless buffalo wings, and my order were bone-in with some strange sweet sauce. I tried to let it slide off, as typically they have great bone-in wings, but these were about the same consistency as the turkey from Christmas Vacation. They were tiny, and about as dry as an old boot. I wish I would've snapped a picture, but my wife and I ate about 3 before just throwing them away.

Overall, I LOVE the food from The Vine, I just think from here on out I'll just trek to the original where I've always had success. The only reason I still use the Coralville location is I call ahead and get it to go, but after two consecutive times of getting my food wrong, I'll just go ahead and go to the original location or probably just stop going at all. I really wish they could get their stuff together, because when the food is...

I used to love the Vine back in the day, (college 25yrs ago and many trips over the years) but I'm not sure if this was a one time thing or the new Vine? The wait was long for our server, however we are sympathetic to that and just ordered food and drinks at same time. Very standard these days in restaurants. Food was really bad. I worked years in food service so I know the struggles and have never in my life sent food back. I did yesterday - the burger, which I ordered Medium was so overcooked that it was completely dry. If it was just well done, I would have been fine. I am not sure what they did to this one. On a returned new burger, it had a little juice to it, but did not taste like hamburger. I had the bleu burger, the bleu cheese was not even a touch warmed and the supposed bacon crumbles tasted more like bread crumbs? Maybe they put one of those meatless patties on it? Worst burger I've ever had, but I wasn't going to send it back twice. My daughter ordered the sliders and got two dry overcooked patties on buns. I just looked at the menu today and there was supposed to be cheese and pickles, she did say no onions. Appetizer of cheese fries under the heater way too long, but I like a little crispier cheese. Brother in law had steak street tacos which looked like he was eating the turkey on Christmas vacation. "A little Dry". Wife ordered the cobb salad and I noticed a lot of chicken still on her plate - she needed a lot more water to wet the bird enough to get it down. On a high note, my first burger came out well ahead of everyone else's food. They insisted I eat so that it was warm, since I had to send it back the second one came out close to when everything else was delivered! One other note, my son said his fish and chips were amazing! Moral of the story - order something from the fryer because you don't want them to try and cook it on the grill! I've always been a fan Vine, but this...

Update: my father contacted the general manager and he apologized for the situation. He wanted to make the situation right. We went back in and the service was better. We were sat down, checked in on while waiting for food, the food made it out to the table in under 20 minutes and the server checked in on us after we had our food. We were also explained that the server helping us the first night was fresh out of training and got more tables than she was scheduled to have due to a shortages of staff. We were happy with the resolution and that the issue we had is not the normal.

Service was horrible, we waited for over an hour for our food to come. During that hour we didn’t see the server to tell us any update. We were about to walk out when they came out with our food finally. My father sent a salad back because he was asked if he wanted it before the meal, which he said yes. It was still charged on the bill. They comped us only $10 on a nearly $100 bill, which still had the salad so it was more like $5 off. We complained and the manager had an attitude with us saying that food was eventually brought out so she didn’t see how she could como is any more than what was comped. Told me the waitress was new and it was her first day on her own. Which I expressed that if she was on her own then they should have trained her better on how to attend customers. We wouldn’t have been nearly as mad had we not felt like we were forgotten for over an hour wondering if they even knew we were there. A check in letting us know they were working in it would...