The Victor Tavern - Edmonds — Restaurant in Edmonds

A Soviet Russia experience at New York City prices.

I'd say our experience here was laughably bad, but that would be an insult to professional comedians. We came for our first visit to this downtown Edmonds destination on Friday at 4 PM - a few people in the place but starting to get more traffic. We ordered a cider and a soda, the pretzel appetizer, and the halloumi salad and rodeo burger entrees.

Soda was completely flat - just syrup and water. After the waiter took it away, she reported it would be "a while" before any actual soda was available.

Pretzel appetizer never showed up.

Entrees arrived but no water ever came to refill the bottle left on the table so the waiter can ignore you more safely.

The grilled halloumi salad was OK, but grilled implies hot, or at least warm, and this protein is served cold. That's a choice, but it's a bad one - the point of halloumi is to taste it, and it should be room temperature or warmer to get the point of halloumi, which is that you can grill or fry it and it won't melt.

The rodeo burger was not that. I was served the bleu burger instead, and everything on the plate was as dry as cardboard. The bun was toasted but at least 3 days old - basically, compressed sawdust. The burger patty was dry as the bone off which the beef was carved. The bacon was crisped to the point of shattering. It was barely lukewarm, which meant the bleu cheese didn't melt. The fries were dry as a bale of hay and cold below the top layer that had been under the warming lamp while waiting for our waiter to serve us.

"Can I interest you in dessert?"

Hard pass, but thanks.

The bill: Eighty dollars.

Eight. Zero.

Sure that could not be right, I read of the mandatory 20% service charge assessed to relieve diners of tipping, then commented to my lovely wife that while I oppose the practice of tipping, it apparently serves some purpose of which I’d been previously unaware.

This place is marketed as a family-friendly pub, and that's exactly what it is: a place for parents to bring their little kids and so they can have a drink and pretend they're getting an upscale experience instead of taking the family to McDonald's ... which, by the way, is less than five minutes away, and where you can get a hot burger that at least approximates what you ordered, a carton of hot, salty, oily fries, and a bucket of fizzy soda for twelve bucks if you round up to give your spare change to Ronald...

Tonight we tried The Victor Tavern in Edmonds which is a "sports bar" by the Ethan Stowell company.

We decided to try it out because I'm using this new app called Inkind and we had a promo offer. It includes quite a few nice restaurants in #Seattle and you too can get a promo offer using the QR code in my last pic. (If you use my code, you'll get a promo offer and I'll get a bonus). I'm not sure if this app has restaurants in other cities but it's free to download the app and check! There are also discounted gift cards on Costcos website to use in the app.

Back to Victor Tavern - The food and beer was very good, if a bit overpriced, and while there were screens everywhere showing "sports" it really has more of an upscale -corporate vibe rather than somewhere people organically go to watch said sports. It reminds me a lot of the type of "sports bar" you find all the business casual duderinos in when you go to like a Marriott or a Hilton for a work conference. You can almost hear the corporate marketing team workshopping the name "Winners Bar?" "No, it needs to be more upscale... Victor Tavern, yeah that's it!"

Anywho, no major complaints as we were there to eat and not be a part of a sports vibe, and the food was good. Colin Maguire had a French dip and I had a chop salad with an added $ chicken breast. Extra points because they had good NA beer options for Colin so he got to try a local NA stout.

This is a place that does charge a service charge, which doesn't bother me, but I know some people are still getting used to this so I wanted to mention it. It's made very clear on the receipt how it all works and that you're not expected to tip on top of the 20% service charge, so that's good! We would normally tip that much anyway.

With the prices of the food and the service charge, our bill was over $90 for two beers and two entrees. It's simply not necessary to pay this much for this type of food in Snohomish County. We personally don't feel the need to pay a premium just to make sure we're at the "sports bar" with a lot of people wearing expensive sweaters. So I doubt we'll go back, but with our Inkind promo it was...

We visited on a Sunday morning and were seated right away as it wasn't too busy. Not too loud, not too crowded, and a very attentive server made the experience good, so five stars for our server and four for atmosphere and ambience. That being said, it's a new place and the building is still new and clean. On to the food: the four of us ordered five entrees (one for the table as a shareable). The biscuits and gravy was very good; the biscuit is LARGE and the dish would do well to have a little more gravy, but a good meal. The Southwest salad was well received as was the Victor Breakfast. The bacon was nice and crispy with caramelized seasoning (probably simple syrup?), and a nice sausage, but the whole wheat bread was like Oroweat, but not as good. It looked like house brand "fortified whole wheat bread," as in cheap and processed. A little odd for this level of restaurant to serve thin cheap bread. The fish and chips come with a very healthy serving of fries, so don't order a side of fries (unless you really want a LOT of fries). We learned later that the fish was overcooked and had more breading than preferred. If we had been told then we would have asked for something else, but that's on us. Here's where it got interesting: The Corned beef hash doesn't have corned beef in it, at least not like 100% of all other corned beef dishes that I have ever seen (this was my dish). The "meat" was simply thin strips of lunch meat mixed into a potato hash. The flavor was not corned beef, we were thinking that maybe it was pastrami? But not corned beef like I (or anyone at our table) was expecting. For the asking price I was expecting chunks/shreds of meat, at least cubes from the can, but this was the most unique approach to "corned beef hash" I have experienced. I don't have a picture of this dish unfortunately, but not ordering it again that's for sure. We are looking forward to another visit where we will order lunch or dinner, because the sandwiches definitely looked good as they...