Potager — Restaurant in Denver

I will preface this by saying there is going to be a huge wall of text; To summarize, I think the food tasted okay, but the price point was way too high for what was actually served, and I disliked some of the ways they described food on the menu. I will go into a lot more detail below, because I believe actual critical feedback can be hugely helpful to restaurants starting out, and while I was unimpressed with the actual experience I had, I think their idea and goal is very cool, and they do actually have all the elements to succeed if they can up their game. If you want the in-depth review, feel free to read below.

I went in the beginning of January with visiting family for dinner. To be very clear, their aesthetic and atmosphere has been well set up. It is very modern, but every element of the design and decor is perfectly cohesive and solidifies a really lovely dining room. The first issue came in when we started looking at the menu; Our table spent a good 15 minutes asking our poor waiter "What is this?" "What does this mean?" "What's in this?". My guess is that is because they are just using random French words for things to make it sound "fancy". It's annoying and feels a little sleazy, and it's completely unnecessary. For dinner, I ended up ordering a wood oven roasted chicken with squash and apples and walnuts and some sauce with it. And to clarify, when they say a roast chicken, they mean half a roast chicken. This I only mentioned because to get this half a wood roasted chicken with squash, apples, walnuts, and sauce was $28 dollars. I can repeat that again: Half. Of a CHICKEN. Cost TWENTY. EIGHT. DOLLARS. Not fancy seafood. Not steak. Not some incredibly exotic complicated dish. Chicken. Roasted chicken. HALF of a roasted chicken. Cost $28 dollars. I don't care if it's the most local, sustainable, free range chicken raised in it's own private mansion coop or whatever, that is exorbitantly priced chicken. But okay, it's fine dining in downtown Denver, right? You'll just have to expect inflated prices in that area right? That's alright, I'm okay with that. But you have to realize that means that my expectations for this half a roast chicken are going to be REALLY high. This half a chicken then comes out, and you can tell they have definitely taken their time with Plating; a beautiful butterflied chicken is sitting on a bed of wood roasted veggies, a lovely drizzle of sauce circling around the rim. Definitely a picture perfect plate, incredibly appetizing. And then I take that first bite, and it's just - dry. Not just dry, like REALLY dry. So dry that I'm having to seriously work with my fork and knife to get through. It was very clearly overcooked almost to death - if I have had more tender rotisserie chicken at the grocery store for $7, you know you have seriously, seriously messed up. On top of that, I realize that the lovely sauce drizzle around the plate was intended to be the ONLY sauce. For an entire half a chicken. Again, I have done fine dining, I've made and had dishes where the sauce is very strong and flavorful and only a minimal amount is needed. THIS sauce is too minimal and too weak to get anything other than salty flavor. So what do I really have? A $28 bone dry half a chicken with a drizzle of essentially gravy on the side on top of a handful of roasted veggies and nuts. Absolutely, incredibly disappointing. To keep giving credit where they get it, I then had a chorizo sundae with horchata ice cream, and that was absolutely amazing. I can also say from trying my wife's creme brulee that their creme is one of the best I've had.

Did I maybe just get a bad dish? Yes, maybe. Like I said above, I think their idea and goal is super cool and they have all the elements in place for success. I'll give it a year and try again if they're still in business then; if they're gotten their act together then I'll definitely change my opinion. I wish the owners the best of luck, really hoping to have my mind...

This restaurant came recommended by some mutual friends who generally tend to have similar tastes to my girlfriend and I, so for our anniversary I thought we would give it a shot. For an important occasion such as an anniversary, I tend to want a reservation so we can plan our night accordingly, but alas, they do not take reservations. OK, not the biggest deal.. I understand why it makes more sense for some restaurants to have policies like this. So we showed up slightly earlier then we normally would expecting a line because this place is fairly popular. Sure enough, there was a wait.. not a crazy wait.. maybe a half hour to forty minutes. We were then seated out back on then patio, which to be honest was way better than if we were to be seated inside. I was dressed for the occasion (long sleeve button up, etc) and inside the restaurant (in July) was just way too warm for me. The patio had a pretty good ambiance and was much quieter anyway, so I didn't mind at all. A few minutes after being seated, the waiter came by to ask whether we'd like "tap or sparkling" water... which I didn't really think about at the time, and with "tap" sounding kind of gross by comparison, we ordered Sparkling. Well, little did I know, we would be brought a bottle of sparkling water to share, which we would then have to pay $7 for. Now $7 is not a lot of money by any means, but the fact that price was never mentioned seemed a bit odd to me... until I remembered the waiter's phrasing..... of course we would pick the $7 option when the other choice is "Tap". Nice marketing there, Potager. By this time we decided to order our app, dinner and drinks all at once because we were pretty hungry. We waited quite a while for our drinks, and in fact the waiter came back to ask if we wanted anything besides water before checking his notes and seeing that we already asked for them. A moment later he did come back with our drinks though. We ordered the fritters as our app, which turned out to be great, and that did improve my impression of the meal overall up to that point, but when entree time came, the Salmon my gf wanted was already sold out (kind of a bummer, but understandable). She decided on the bbq chicken, and I went with an off menu special for the night, which was Rock Fish. My fish tasted great, no doubt about it.. the flavor was there and the cook was spot on.. I just wish it would have been served with some kind of starch or a little more veggies to make it a bit more filling. My gf had the opposite problem... the chicken she got was a portion way too big for her to finish and probably would have been too much for me as well, but with my portion being so small, I ended up helping with hers. It wasn't hard to see the portion disparity as the plates were placed before us, let's just say that. Some time mid entree I was asked whether I wanted another drink, but I didn't end up seeing it until right about the same time the check was in front of us. When asked whether we wanted to have any dessert, we both looked at each other and knew instantly that we would rather go someplace else. Finally, we were asked whether we'd like her leftover chicken boxed, so they took it away to do so... but we never got it back. We decided that continuing to wait there for our leftovers just wan't worth it after a while, so we just left. Overall, the flavors weren't bad, the decor was nice, and the staff was relatively friendly (albeit forgetful or possibly overworked), but it was those mistakes and weird quirks that really detracted from what should have been a great meal, and turned it into a kind of.. "meh" meal. If our friends really, really wanted to go back, I might give it another shot... it could be that I was just there on an off night, or the waiter was just overworked, or any number of things... but if someone asks me how Potager is, I would probably respond "It's.....OK", and I probably wouldn't personally...

When we arrived at Potager, my daughter asked our server if an open door could be closed. He said that it had been warmer earlier but that he also thought the door should be closed and he would ask if he could close it and let us know. He was very busy and didn’t get back to us for ~10 min. Assuming it had slipped his mind, I asked the owner, who was walking by, if the door could be closed since we were a little chilly. She told me she had already told our server that she would close it a later and that I wasn’t the only person in the restaurant and I need to appreciate she has to think of all customers and not only of my table. I let her know I totally understood and that I only asked because I had assumed our server had forgotten. She went off w/out saying anything. Her tone was very irritated, condescending and she couldn’t have been more unpleasant. My wife was very upset by this and said we would never be coming back. Then we all decided to make the best of it and put this behind us and enjoy the ourselves and the food, which was very good. We had ordered a bottle of wine and while we were eating, another server who we hadn’t seen up to this point, came and w/out asking refilled our wine glasses. I was thinking that this was a little odd but fine and was about to take a bite of my food, when he spilled the glass of wine on me. He was very embarrassed, apologized, brought me a new napkin after i wiped myself off, and left. At this point, I had to say something to our server. I explained that since he didn’t get back to me about closing the door, I asked the owner who proceeded to condescendingly lecture me and that a random server spilled a glass of wine directly into my lap and food. He apologized and went off. The owner came over and said that she hoped she hadn’t offended me (no apology ever). I explained to her why she had. She seemed to accept this but left w/out saying anything. The server who spilled the drink on me returned to apologize again. To his credit, he was the only person of the three who truly was sorry. We finished our meal. I told my wife and daughter that I was sure we’d be comped the bottle of wine at the very least. They both told me we’d get nothing. Our waiter came and left our bill without addressing anything that had happened. We were comped nothing. I called over the owner and told her that since a significant amount of wine was spilled on me I should be comped at least half the price of the bottle. Without saying anything, she went and removed 1/2 the cost of the bottle and returned the bill. Again, she never apologized for anything. I wrote out on the receipt why i was leaving a bad tip (8-9%. usually, I always tip ~25%) due to our unpleasant experience. We will never be back. My daughter in particular was very upset. She is a regular at Potager and loves it. But she had come earlier in the week w/ her mom and had also had an unpleasant interaction with the owner. She also will never be back. Finally, as awful as the owner was, if our server had done his job and told us the door would be closed a little later and handled the spilled wine issue by comping us, I never would have had to speak...