Tamalpie — Restaurant in Mill Valley

Based on the Marin Independent Journal's food calendar for the past several weeks (perhaps more), Tamalpie Pizzeria was offering 1/2 price bottles of wine on Wednesdays. Since this place is a ten-minute walk from our new home it sounded like a perfect reason to try it out! We were quickly seated and when the waiter came we ordered a bottle of pinot and mentioned the special. A few minutes later she came with the wine (in a carafe) and two glasses in hand. She then told us that her manager said they were no longer offering the special and that he had been fighting with the newspaper to have them remove this information but it kept showing up. Now, I guess there's no way to know for sure but there were (and are) plenty of date-specific postings in that section of the newspaper for other restaurants' specials, happy-hours, etc., so I'm not sure why the Marin IJ would be so unresponsive to just this particular restaurant... Anyway, we were then asked if we would still like the wine with our dinner. It had already been a long wait (for the manager meeting I suppose) & we weren't in the mood to haggle over the price of their on-tap vino...so we chose to stay and try to make the best of it. In the end we spent $98.00 for a two-person pizza and wine night: Decent pizza...mediocre wine...and VERY poor decision making by management/owner (who never did make his way over to our table on this slow-ish Wednesday evening).

You can see a picture of the Marin Independent Journal in my...

Torn on giving Tamalpie 2 stars bc our waitress was AWFUL but the food was great. Loved the kale salad and rigatoni. However the issues with the waitress cannot be forgotten. We asked the waitress how big the kids’ meal serving size was. She shrugged at first and then indicated that the pasta, Mac and cheese, and pizzas were about as big as a small circle she made with her hands. We ordered each of our children a dish bc preschools can eat a 4” diameter dish that she indicated. However she was wrong. They were as big as the adult pasta and pizza dishes that were ordered. The manager was great in taking some of the food back after we explained the problem. Then we asked the waitress how many toppings the kids’ sundaes came with. She said “one or two”. Then she charges us $1 per topping. Why stop at one or two? She could have said $1 per topping or one, two, three, four, or five bc she was charging us for each. She happily took her automatic gratuity for our large party despite all the issues we ran into bc of her answers. The manager was courteous and the food was great but she was awful. Was she not trained properly or really just trying to rack up her...

Coming from a dasher. This place is awful when it comes to customer service and communication. They’re the worst in customer service connection, especially floor manager Miguel. I waited more than a one hour and when I got there last Friday night there was a line one other customers (to go orders) and dashers as well, when I asked for my client’s order the lady said to wait but failed to provide me with ETA. So I decided to wait thinking it would take about 15 minutes max, then I kept asking and still no answers, so finally after about 45 minutes I decided to talk to another employee who happened to be Miguel the manager, so I told him “is there anyway you can provide me the timeframe for the order and I informed him that I had been waiting for way too long” so his reply was “you can drop the order”, he didn’t show any sympathy. I’ll be honest as a dasher I have seen many places, some of them I return as a customer but this one I’ll avoid at all costs. Especially seeing how the employees prepare food...