Merkin Vineyards Tasting Room & Osteria — Restaurant in Cottonwood

Let me start by saying that I REALLY wanted this to be an amazing experience. I have been looking forward to this visit since they opened, however, living in California, the trip had to be planned. We decided a New Year's Eve dinner was a great excuse to make the trip. I arrived at the restaurant excited to try the food, having had a few of the wines already, I was hoping the food would win my wife over. (She has a go to wine and doesn't really stray from it, so I knew it would have to be the food to win her over). When we got in line at the host stand, we noticed things weren't moving very fast. There were about 3 parties in front of us but something just wasn't moving quickly. When we finally got to the host stand, we told them we had 3 and would like to sit inside, we were told there would be a "little" wait for inside which we were fine with. There were about 5 open tables in the restaurant the entire time we were waiting, 3 or 4 had reserved signs on them. I suspect it was to limit the number of tables the servers had, because the website says they don't accept reservations for less than 8 people. Once we were sat, it took our server quite a while to get to us, we ordered a glass of wine, 2 tasters of wines, and a lemonade for our son. We also asked for waters for the 3 of us and ordered the Pane appetizers. Wine came pretty quickly, lemonade to follow, but no water, which we requested again. Server came back to take our order, Pepperoni Pizza, Chicken Relleno Lasagna, Tagliolini Ragu, Glass of wine for the wife, and the waters again. Apps came out, a little slow, but not bad, asked for waters again and they finally came out. Hummus was substituted for some mustard on our app with no explanation. We thought it was a mistake, so we flagged down the manager as she walked by our table. She told us they will substitute mustard if they run out of hummus, but she would go check and see what happened. She returned quickly with a side of hummus. Glad we asked it was pretty good. When the food arrived, it left a lot to be desired on all fronts. The Ragu was pretty flavorless. I could tell that the pasta was good quality, but it seemed over cooked and the sauce was just bland all around, very little meat and it was so fine that it was hard to tell what it was. The Chicken Relleno Lasagna was dry so my wife asked for some additional sauce for it. Surprised to see that they charged us $2 for additional sauce. Pizza had decent flavor but it was very hard to chew. All in, the issues we had were due to the leader failing to recognize that things weren't going well. There were plenty of team members working but none of them were paying attention to the guests that needed help. We saw multiple tables sit and wait for service, one of them actually got up and left because they were never served. If the manager had just been directing and supporting the team, things would have gone much better. As for the food, it probably needs to be reworked a bit. The Cannoli was also burnt on top. Damn! I have so many suggestions that could really improve the operations of this restaurant and I SINCERELY hope that someone will pay attention to the reviews that aren't so great. The opportunity to be GREAT is right in front of them...Please dig in here team... Oh yea...One more easy win...Get someone out front selling bottle wine to people as they exit, and reduce the price for people taking it home. $50 for a bottle at the table makes sense, $50 to take that bottle home does not. BevMo in Phoenix had if for around...

Yikes!

The view is gorgeous. The restaurant is beautiful. That's about where it ends.

We arrived at 12:00pm, waited in line for 20 minutes to check in. We waited another 45 min for a table. I understand the wait, it was busy. We sat at our table and ordered drinks and our food right away since we all reviewed the menu as we waited for our table, waited 40 min for the drinks to come at which time we were told to pick another item because there were no more the lasagna cupcakes. Bread and butter came out about an hour in. The rest of the time was spent waiting for our food without any drink refills or seeing our waitress, being checked on. Another hour went by and we decided to flag down our waitress to ask how much longer it was going to be for our food.

We were told the orders are put in and it's "the luck of the draw" (literally what our waitress said, what??) on what gets prepared and how long it takes for food to come out. Our waitress was so nonchalant about the amount of time we were waiting.

We then asked for a manager. The manager came and said because we ordered pizzas, their oven can only cook 3 at a time and there's a significant wait. He told us our food should be out in about 10 minutes.

Fast forward 20 min later and another manager comes to our table and tells us the pizzas take the longest because their oven can only cook 5 pizzas at a time. She assured us our food would be out in 10 min.

Finally 15 min later our food came out. We immediately asked for our bill because lord only knows how long it would have taken for our waitress to come back.

We finally left at 3:30pm after wasting a good chunk of our afternoon. The waitstaff and managers had a very blasé attitude about wait times and terrible service.

The food was ok. Ours came out luke warm (we ordered Gnocchi and the ragu spaghetti), our Cesar salad was warm too and served on a hot plate which was really odd. I got the feeling our food had been sitting for a while, maybe waiting on the couple pizzas we ordered.

We weren't the only unhappy patrons on Saturday, Nov. 11. It seemed everyone in the restaurant was unhappy with their service. We had multiple people come by our table and ask how long we were waiting, the consensus being that most everyone waited at least 2 hours for their food to come out.

Merkin could be a great place if they can get it together. I don't know if I'll chance visiting again, but I sure hope they can work out their service and...

We had high hopes for this establishment. Drove all the way down for Phoenix to try it out after seeing the announcement of the new restaurant.

We arrived at 12pm, was told there was a 45 minute wait. At 1218 we got the text that our table was ready. We were seated at an extremely small booth for 6 people. One of the hostesses noticed and was nice enough to get us a bigger booth.

And it went down hill from there. It took about another 20 minutes for us to be greeted by our waitress and to get water. We placed our order immediately since it had already taken so long just to get water. About 20 minutes after ordering our waitress informed us that the kitchen was out of one of the meals we ordered. We requested to see the menu again to find a replacement, waitress disappeared again………. Finally waved her down about 15 minutes later and asked if we could place the replacement meal and asked for a few refills on our drinks. Our drinks were brought to the wrong table twice and then brought to us. So numerous dirty hands just grabbed a hold of our glasses and she felt it was okay to then bring them to our table. We watched both tables grab the drinks and then express how they didn’t not order these, hand them back and added back to her tray. When she finally realized what table they belonged to, she brought them over. We did not drink these!

We finally received our food at 140pm. We’re pretty sure our original order was placed on hold due to one of the items not being available. Tables seated after us were greeted promptly, given bread and butter, received pizzas and checked out before we got our food.

The pizza was delicious, the fresh tomatoes were juicy and full of flavor, crust was crispy and airy at the same time. We ordered 2 pizzas and only received one but at this point we were completely over it and didn’t say anything.

We ordered 2 different pastas. One was completely tasteless, literally no flavor! The other was so overwhelmingly full of garlic butter I couldn’t eat it. It was more of like a ramen than a pasta.

It’s now 220 pm and we are leaving the restaurant grumpy and hungry. And surprise, everyone outside is warning people walking up to not go inside and telling them how terrible their experience was. So it doesn’t sound like it was just us……….

I would not return...