D. H. LESCOMBES WINERY & BISTRO — Restaurant in Las Cruces

I wanted to say before I start this review that I picked D. H. Lescomes Winery & Bistro because it looked extravagant and had great reviews on the food from other people. I was here for a birthday and I wanted everyone to have a good time.

Let's start the review, I had made a reservation for 5:45 PM and arrived on time. I went to the front to state I was at the location and ready to be seated. The gentleman at the front told me to hold on while they find a table for us to sit and then went off. We stood around for 15 more minutes before someone else came to ask what we were waiting for and then reconfirmed we had a reservation. We waited for about 5 more minutes and where told to follow them to a table. Once we got to the table we had to wait for the table to be cleaned for us to sit. This was already turning out to be a very awkward time for such a high end restaurant. Once the table was cleaned we sat down and waited for a waiter. We waited about another 10 minutes before a waiter came around and told us that he had just learned we were even there in the first place. We were given a sample of wine then ended up waiting some more before the waiter came back to take our wine order. We placed our order and waited for it to come. When the waiter came back with the wine he started to place the glasses down and the stumbled and dropped most of the wine on me completely drenching me in the wine. I was upset, very upset but I did not want to ruin the birthday, so I went on with dinner experience. We went on to order our food and when it came we started eating. Now the food was not bad but it was not great. After finishing the meal my party and I were ready to leave because our experience was not at all what we were expecting. I asked for my check and expecting that they might have comped something off the bill because of what happened, that's usually what resturants do when there is a bad experience but to my surprise there was nothing. I called the waiter over and asked if I could have the wines at least comped because of the earlier incident and when the bill came back only one wine had be taken off. I was extremely upset and was ready to leave when my sister insisted on speaking with the manager. When the manager, Devon came out she spoke with us and then started speaking with me trying to tell me that it was an honest mistake and that we had a drink comped for it. I told her that it is usually customary for a restaurant to offer that and not have to be asked for it to be done by the patron. I also mentioned to her that we were taken to a table that hadn't even been cleaned and that this experience was subpar for such an establishment. She fully understood and ended up giving me $40 dollars in credit for another visit, reimbursed me my whole check and gave me a bottle of wine complimentary which were all nice gestures but I was already over this restaurant.

I will not be going back to this establishment anytime soon if at all. I chose this location over many others because of how it looked over the other resturants I could have gone to and I was extremely disappointed. The staff needs to get trained again on how to handle these types...

It had been a family tradition to eat at this restaurant after participating in the Annual Bataan Memorial Death March; however, after this last visit on 3/16/24, we will no longer be eating at this restaurant for the reasons below.

We made a reservation using Yelp well in advance of 3/16/24 and we received all the text messages confirming this reservation, but to be sure, we called that morning to confirm. The person that answered the telephone told us that it "happens all the time" that they don't get the reservations because ours was not listed. So, we made a reservation. We ended up needing to increase the number within our party and called the restaurant again. This time the person that answered the phone said we didn't have a reservation, but could get us in 30 minutes later than our original time. We made a reservation for the THIRD time. We had a last-minute cancellation and had to decrease the number in our party; therefore, we called to adjust and the person that answered the telephone said we didn't have a reservation. At this point, we were more than annoyed and the person was very cavalier that losing our reservation is "normal" and we were skeptical we would actually have a reservation when we arrived that evening.

Things get better, when we arrived at the restaurant, they had our reservation; however, they decided to seat us next to the door leading out to the patio. From the moment, we sat down, the door was cracked open and the cold breeze was too much for us, especially with my elderly mother and my sister who has a hypersensitive immune system. A slight chill can cause them to get sick. Knowing this, I watched the staff use their feet to open the door because their hands were full of plates and only one server tried to close the door behind them. All others were fine with leaving the door open. So, about every 5 minutes, I got up to close the door. At first, I closed it slowly, but after 45 minutes, I was slamming the door. At one point, the door locked and for about 15 minutes, we were able to enjoy our evening.

Our server, Annette, was fantastic and extremely apologetic for the door, which we appreciated. One might ask why we didn't ask to be seated somewhere else, well, we were at the restaurant during the busy time and their were no tables available. So, this evening consisted of me closing a door every 5 minutes for 90 minutes. When we paid our bill, we did express to Annette that her service was excellent, but we would not be returning. She insisted we speak to the manager. This is when David tried to make things right by offering a complimentary bottle of wine or discounting our bill. The point of raising this concern of being chilled sitting by this door, which he told me wouldn't be open during the winter because it is too cold, was to avoid having another customer experience the same. The layout of the restaurant needs to be modified to allow for the patio to be used on nicer winter evenings; unfortunately, I believe the feedback fell on deaf ears. Please see note on dietary...

We had our wedding rehearsal dinner here a few weeks ago, and the experience was pretty disappointing. I made the reservation a little less than 2 months out from the wedding. I have numerous emails back and forth between me and the event manager, the last one being 24 days before the dinner. I called the restaurant the day of the dinner to decrease our headcount by a few people, and the person who picked up the phone gave me the feeling that they couldn't find our reservation based on their responses/questions (like asking multiple times after giving my name "you have a reservation here tonight?" "How many people?" etc). Sure enough, not too long after I get off the phone, the person I had been emailing for weeks called and I could tell they had not put down a reservation for us; she asked me again something along the lines of "you have a reservation here tonight?", asked us the time we were coming, asked me what room we were going to be in, and the most ridiculous, she asked me if I had signed a contract for the room!! Literally all of this info she was asking for was in the emails we had sent back and forth. We get to the restaurant and they have ONE [inexperienced] server for a party of 16. As a former waitress of many years I could tell she was too new to be doing this on her own; it's not the waitress' fault at all, but I am very frustrated with the restaurant because they clearly were not tracking our reservation and this poor girl probably got thrown onto our party last minute. Because of this, the service was EXTREMELY slow. Everyone in our party was commenting on how slow the service was, and by the end I was pretty embarrassed that I had picked this place. This also caused us to stay out a lot later than we had wanted to, considering we had to wake up for our wedding the next morning. When my [now] husband and I tried the restaurant out this summer to see if we wanted to have the dinner there, the service was also extremely slow and the waitress was pretty absent; we assumed for our rehearsal dinner it would be better because we'd have our own waitresses assigned to our party but clearly not.

The food is pretty good, and the atmosphere is nice. But I'm honestly shocked that a nice restaurant like this could screw up a reservation for a big party like this that had been planned for almost 2 months. I would not recommend scheduling events here, especially if they are more important than a rehearsal dinner because in my opinion they can't be trusted to track your reservation or provide...