Miracle on Mercer at Franklin Social — Restaurant in Jersey City

I really want FS to succeed but they seem Seem determined to fail.

Since I live one block away and pass it multiple times per day and I’m a commercial real estate broker, I thought my observations may be helpful.

Please remove the burlap curtains from the main dining room. One of the most charming aspects of this small restaurant is its enormous frontage in a leafy green, beautiful part of down Jersey City. Two reasons for this: 1) you want this place to look lively and people outside to see inside the inside of a restaurant before they go in. This is an animal instinct that cannot be changed. 2) for diners inside it’s more pleasant to be able to rest your gaze on passerby than on a burlap curtains. Also please remove the weird sewing machine and dressmakers dummy from the annex windows this looks nothing if not dusty and drab and does not connote “good times and good food”. If your menu is not working toss it out. The menu here lacks any direction. It’s like a hodge podge lodge of average plates that are too expensive and not unique enough in preparation to give this place any edge. I can get burgers and pastas anywhere and don’t find anything so well executed here that I would waste the time.

If you want to stick w your Ben Franklin theme that’s fine. Ben was an avid traveler and crafting an interesting menu of international small plates should be a no brainer even in a restaurant with a small kitchen and limited exhaust.

Some ideas: Ramp up the sharing plate options: ⁃ partner w Van Vorst cheese to rotate a sampling pairing plate of cheeses (blue with shaved chocolate, manchego with quince, etc) ⁃ Middle Eastern - labneh, smoked eggplant, chopped Israeli salad, pita, etc. ⁃ Spanish tapas - dates with bacon, Cristal bread, olives, great bread paired with innovative toppings. ⁃ Pizzettes - plenty pizza in JC most of it bad. Rotating creative 12 inch hand stretched pies (onion jam and Gorgonzola, truffle cheese, garlic scapes and fig …)

For the entrees have one hamburger if you must. But please offer a creative vegetarian option not the despised bean burger or a portabella burger.

There are a few new items pointing in the right direction BUT… lamb chops, duck, filet mignon??? Please I would rather eat these items at Gramercy Tavern or suffer them at a country club. Same goes for Fish and Chips and a Roast Chicken. Have you noticed that JC has the largest population of young affluent Asians in the tristate? This crowd is young sophisticated and fit. They don’t eat this stuff. Their parents did.

In short, this needs a rethink and a tastier and more unique vision that focuses on smaller plates and caters to a more sophisticated customer. We all work in the city and know where to get an excellent chop. Surprise us with some delicious creativity. Do not assume that because this is NJ you can serve the same things that work in the burbs. You should be looking at Tribeca and SoHo as your competition and see what’s...

i’ve been here twice before, and honestly i didn’t mind it, it felt nice, and the food was good ( keep in mind the last time i was here was a exactly a year ago. ) when we first came in it was going good, we got sat in 2 minutes, and we were just chilling. around 20 minutes later we were wondering why no one has come over to take our order. ( maybe we had to ask when we wanted to, but we never understood that. ) so someone got up and asked a server, the server told us that she couldn’t see us, and we understood that it was quite packed and we were sitting next to the entrance meaning that it would be really crowded. so we ordered. 30-40 minutes later, they brought back a soda. one little sparkling water. then around 10 minutes later, we got two entrees. 20 minutes later, we had not gotten any other food, even though we ordered more than HOUR ago. then randomly one of the people from a table and came up to us and handed the hamburger i ordered. “ hey they brought me this, by the way, my son already ate a fry. “ shock, was coming through my face. i had not eaten anything in like 5 hours, so i ate the food anyways, i was soo hungry and had only eaten chips from the one of the entrees. people were being really annoying, and kept playing around with the santa ( ps- i understand u cannot control people, so this is not going bring down in ur score in the review. ) then we complained to not the server, not the manager, not even the host… we had to complain to a bartender, since he was the one that had came up to us, when we requested our server. listen, i understand these are like people, and we make mistakes, and they were probably overwhelmed since it was PACKED, so we understand that they made a mistake. in the end our server came up to us, and said that the hamburger we would not need to pay for, but they did have horrified look when i told her that the women’s kid ate a piece of it. ( she thought i was talking about the burger. ) in the end, honestly it was pretty sad, and we just sat in silence after that. i would recommend for this place to get more employees since there’s so many people eating, yet not as many employees to handle people. ( ps i just realized this. our food was kinda bad, and the shrimp carbonara, tasted like they had got it out of a take out box, and just warmed it up. the food wasn’t good, and it just wasn’t that good to call it “ fantastic “ ) but i did get a free koala guy out of this from the koallaaa drink. 👍 so in review, please get more employees, we had an employee who looked upset because he had to serve both the WHOLE entire back area, and entire outside area.

edit - the employees felt really bad, and apologised to us, so thank...

This was my second time at Franklin Social, the first time was great, I ordered the rock shrimp, burrata, scallops and the drinks were good.

This time, we arrive and there’s no host or anyone at the bar. We wait a few minutes but eventually just seat ourselves. About 10 minutes later a server appears, I order the rock shrimp dish and it’s not rock shrimp, it’s 4 regular shrimps. Whereas before you got a nice bowl with a fair amount of rock shrimp coated in sauce now it’s just 4 shrimp drizzled with sauce. Then I ordered the coq a vin, but the server came back a few minutes later and told us it wasn’t available. I can understand running out of a dish towards the end of dinner service, but we were literally there at the start of their service at 4 PM. In lieu of the coq a vin I ordered the chicken lollipops and the mac & cheese to have as a meal. However, I was expecting some sort of chicken on a stick. The chicken lollipops are in fact three drumsticks, and I really hate drumsticks. They should explain that on the menu that it’s drumsticks meat. I tried to eat it, but it just is not something that I like at all. Plus it did not even come with the blue cheese described in the menu. It just came with the hot honey which I feel is so weird to eat chicken with a dollop of honey on it. Then I moved on to the Mac n cheese and I thought okay at least I can eat this, but it was seriously lacking in flavor, if there were a salt shaker around I would’ve added salt. But I ate the Mac anyway cause at this point I’m just hungry, not because it was any good.

So 4 shrimp $18, 3 drumsticks $16, and bland Mac n cheese $14, all dubbs still hungry. My partner had the lamb which he said was nothing to write home about.

We got the check and it was $128 with a 20% tip already included which I thought was odd, usually tips are automatically added for parties of 5 or more. In any case, I would’ve tipped the server 20% anyway since he did a good job, after all it’s not his fault the food was a miss today.

The only hilight of the evening was the hot chocolate and the Christmas decor is super...