Mertens Prime & Rooftop — Restaurant in Grand Rapids

We were excited to try this place but after our experience we will not be going back. 3 hours, over $250, and terrible service. The night started promising when we were seated right away even though we were 10 min early to our reservation for 4. Everything was downhill from there. Our table had a large water spill, people were missing appetizer plates, and my napkin had a hole in it. After 20 min, no one had come to our table to greet us or ask for our drink order - we had to flag down the maitre d’ and ask if we had a waiter. It took another 5 min for the waiter to come over. No introduction, just stated, “there was a mixup on the tables.” We put our drink orders in and waited… it had been 45 min since we were seated and still didn’t even have drinks. Once we got them, we placed our appetizer order right away. We had the meatballs, escargot, and eggs mayonnaise. They were unfortunately out of the bone marrow that night. During the 30 minutes it took to get the appetizers, we placed another drink order which took 20 min to get. The appetizers were fine, but the meatballs were overcooked and very dry without the sauce. It’s unfortunate that they only give you 3 of them, so none of us could have an entire (normal sized) meatball. Our waiter was extremely inattentive. He didn’t ask how the food or drinks were until he cleared away the appetizer plates. At this point, we were an hour and 20 minutes into “dinner” and we were finally able to put the entree orders in. We got the 8oz filet, crispy duck cassoulet, salmon, and roasted chicken along with the brussel sprouts, haricot vert (green beans) almondine, roasted garlic potato puree, and the pomme frites for the sides. Our waiter asked if we wanted the frites dusted in “magic” which is supposed to be a sugary and spicy coating. We said sure. Another 40 minutes passed before we received our food. Our waiter came by only once during this time and it was a 5 minute process of him staring intensely at his order pad while clearing away all of our plates, rearranging silverware, placing new plates, etc. He did not provide a time update, apologize for the long wait, make conversation or anything. The only thing he said was that the napkin on my plate was for the skillet to rest on. It had been 2 hours and 20 min from the time we were seated before our food finally arrived. None of the entrees were bad, but there was nothing special about them. I asked for my filet medium because places tend to undercook steak, as this one does, so it came out medium rare which is what I was after. The menu says that it is “bacon wrapped” and comes with a garlic herb compound butter. The filet was not bacon wrapped. Instead, there was a single piece of bacon on the plate and the butter was missing. We also noticed that the green beans hadn’t arrived. As we waited for our waiter to come around, we tried some of the sides. The Brussels were probably the best thing we had. The potato puree was smooth but lacked salt and didn’t really have a roasted garlic flavor to it. The pomme frites were lukewarm, tasted meh, and were missing the “magic dust.” We flagged the waiter down and inquired about the butter and the green beans. No apology, just “yep let me grab that.” Surprisingly, he returned very quickly and brought the butter and the side of green beans, if you can even call them that. We understand that haricot vert are narrower green beans, but these were the tiniest, most shriveled things I have ever seen. It was about a toddler’s fist full of “beans” in the dish and these are supposed to be shareable sides. It looked like someone scraped together the last bits from a pot that had been there a while. On top of that, they tasted like straight oil. They never should have left the kitchen or have been served. We asked for them to be comped, as well as the up charge for the dust that never came on the frites, and one of the drinks that arrived warm. All in all, we left exactly 3 hours and 2 min from when arrived and it wasn’t because we were having a good time or...

My new wife and i, along with another couple were celebrating. We arrived at 5:50pm, our reservation was at 6:00pm. We were greeted warmly and promptly. It took us a minute to get settled in and ordered a round of apertifs: 2 sazeracs, a pink lady, and a glass of sparkling wine. It took about 20 minutes to get the drinks, but they forgot the sparkling wine. We were conversing, so it honestly was not paying attention to the wait. We placed starters and entrees/sides:

Starters hit the table at 7:00ish: Bone Marrow - tasty, loved the marrow spoons! Could have had less caramelized onions, honestly, ratio was a little off.

Beet and chevre - server recommended and was great. Creamy and just a beautiful salad.

Montréal poutine - traditional brown gravy was gritty. Not my favorite.

Dijon Poutine - the addition of the dijon was a great touch with the smokey bacon. This one was much better than the other poutine.

At this point, i had ordered the "2016 pascal granger, "Clos de Pouletes"" for the table just so that it could breathe for a minute before the four steaks we ordered came. By this time it was 7:45pm before the entrees came. We honestly were blown away that it was so late and entrees hadn't arrived. Our server appeared to have 3 tables. We had to accelerate our eating to make our next event that started at 8 that we pushed back to 830. Back to the wine... when our entrees dropped, our server informed us that the wine i had ordered (and wanted to breath a second) was out of stock and said "we will find something comparable." The manager brought it over and it was the wrong wine and discovered that it was for her other table. The server returned with another wine, presented it, in which i will say, by this time, i did not remember what we had ordered so i said ok. It was a lovely wine, however, later discovered after we had paid, in haste, that we were charged almost 3x the amount of our original bottle of wine. Shame on us for not checking the price before we paid the check, however, shame on the restaurant for finding something "comparable". A restaurant has an obligation to find a wine comparable in flavor AND in price.... or at least let the guest know of cost difference. It was recognized there were some difficulties by the server and manager and the both apologized. The manager apologized again and gave us a gift card to come back. This is "managing a restaurant 101" and i thank you for recognizing it was not the best performance. However, i find it rather insulting the price difference in the bottle we received and the one we ordered was +$91 and the gift card we received was just $15. That's not even enough to offset one sazerac ($14) with tax and tip. Our total bill was around $500 without tip. One can do the math of our 3% "gift card" compensation to our +31% increase in bottle of wine to bill

Food was good, service was pretty good. Just some growing pains and training for guest...

Pretty disappointed by this place. Went out for a special occasion (and told the server that it was our anniversary) restaurant was nearly empty and service was still slow. I have worked in fine dining restaurants and that's clearly what they're trying to be. There's a lot that wasn't great 1) I was served the wrong $15 cocktail, the waitress never came back so I had to go to the bar to exchange it, where the bartender condescendingly explained what a New York Sour was, and was then surprised when I told him it wasn't what I ordered, and then it wasn't comped from our bill!?! 2) the waitress couldn't explain one of the dishes, went to ask the bartender for help, came back, and then what I was served didn't match her explanation 3) we got the corn fritters as an app and they were very plain (the menu described them as "spiced") but! The one relish-like sauce they came with was quite good 4) they make the food runners use tray stands to deliver literally a single appetizer which is very funny and also highlights that they want to be fine dining 4.5) They fired our appetizers and dinners at the same time?! So we got both at once which is fine if you're paying $40 for dinner for 2 but at this price point and genre of dining is pretty ridiculous 5)the food runners drop food so there is no follow up from the server to see if the food is right, and our server didn't come back around to quality check until our meals were half gone 6)my hunter's pie was mediocre, and not a pie or a stew, both of which are words used to describe it on the menu, and was made with ground meat that had a weird texture, as opposed to like, stew meat which would make sense given the description. Very diner ground beef and gravy vibes, except it cost over $40. My partner's vegan tagine was very good though, and well-seasoned. 7)we got the tableside bananas foster, which was fun, but for some reason I think they use frozen bananas, which is stupid, and I'm pretty confident in this because we got our bananas separate from the icecream and still got a few that were ice cold/woody in the middle 8)having server stations in view of customers just serves to make everyone miserable, we waited a looooong time to pay, no amount of trying to catch someone's eye would work, and I eventually literally had to wave at the three employees standing in the server station before one would come over so we could pay. Also, I see a previous review mentioned the best thing about their meal was the free bread and we didn't even get that! Definitely not...