Griffin Tavern — Restaurant in Denver

This is an awesome neighborhood bar. Huge plus for serving food, too. Their cocktail menu and liquor selection is not huge, but rather well-curated, which I appreciate. Lots of local beers. Location is clean, and ceilings are high. It can feel a little cold and stale when empty, but serves the need for a local industry bar at night. Therefore, it completely fills up around 9:30/10PM and stays that way. There is one male manager...don't know his name, but I know he makes the staff schedule. Apparently he likes to drink quite a bit AT work, and speaks very inappropriately to his staff. It felt like he cared more about taking advantage of his position in power, verbally poking fun at his bartender, making jokes that she couldn't really respond to or defend herself - I'm sure because he literally said, "Careful, I write your schedule." He really left a bad taste and made me feel creeped out. My fiancé didn't say anything to him, or to me inside, but on the way home he mentioned that the bartender gave him "the Look" when her boss began his weird act. Apparently, once she learned my partner is a bouncer at a club, she gave him that, "please help me" look. While I like going here and want to support the staff, if this particular man is there next time, I walking right out the door. Drinking for free and stroking his own ego heavily compromised his level of professionalism, and as a restaurant manager myself, I see that as a huge liability to a business financially and a potentially giant HR snare. Sorry, Griffin, maybe...

I was amazed that this place had a 4.7 with 55 reviews so we went. The place has a good bottled beer selection, or pretty boring set of regular taps, but their rotating taps are also good. The service is also pretty solid as are the fries, and the whiskey selection looked good too.

But let's talk about the burgers. This place almost exclusively has burgers for entrees, and it's a fairly small menu, so you expect a killer burger, especially with amazing reviews and a mention on a list of burger places in denver. They aren't impressive at all, they're fine, at best. The patty itself is a pretty uninspired regular beef patty, not all that different from a mid range grocery store. Patties are cooked to order, but come out more well done than expected, and are pretty heavy on char, I don't know if the grill is too hot or what, but it left an unpleasant taste on the patty.

So, my beef with this place is that it looks, acts, and reviews like a high end burger place, but really fails to deliver on the patty. The bun was actually pretty good, and the peppered bacon, while a little on the tough side was also good. But the patty game needs to be stepped up a lot for this...

Went with a group of 4 girls and a guy approached us, he became very unwelcome very quick and as we asked him to leave a couple of times he then became hostile. As we were actively telling him that he was mad disrespectful and he needed to walk away and leave us alone for the second time, the female bartender came and ushered our group to leave (I think because we were the calmer of the two groups) and that’s just crazy to me. If you’re a female…maybe don’t go to this bar because it’s not safe for you. Anyway…we walked outside with intentions to leave, calling Ubers and such..the guy came out and approached our group of 4 girls and continues to say disrespectful things to the girls to the point that the patrons of the bar pulled him away from us in an attempt to keep him from saying wild insults and comments while bar staff did nothing to keep this man away from us or keep us safe. So to sum things up…The staff did nothing to keep us safe and bar patrons had to step in and keep this man away from us as we were waiting for our Uber, do...