The Pickled Loon Saloon — Restaurant in Grand Rapids

This place is very hit and miss on the food. I ate here a couple of times while in the area for work and the food was made very quickly. If you are in Grand Rapids and call in an order, it is guaranteed to be ready by the time you make the short jaunt from town to pick it up. The Loon Eggs were great, balls of deep-fried mashed potatoes, stuffed with chives and cheese. These are about halfway between a golf ball and a tennis ball in size, with 4 included with the order, and quite good. I also had the Italian Nachos with that order. These leave a lot to be desired, although they might be a little better without a short drive before consuming them. They don't use straight cheese, but rather a cheese sauce that will quickly sog-out the wonton chips, but the toppings are otherwise solid. They are more of a soggy fork dish than nachos because of that sauce. The next time I went I had the Walleye fingers which were very good, and the macaroni and cheese with pork belly. The pork belly was what you'd expect, well seared, half-fat and half-meat, and pretty tasty. The macaroni is actually cavatelli, as they advertise, but the cheese sauce was very thin and runny, and not what you would expect for even cheap alfredo, let alone a mac and cheese dish. The bland thin sauce does the dish a disservice. Because only half of the dishes here do justice, I cannot provide a strong recommendation, but would encourage enjoying the walleye and the loon eggs. It is odd to me how a restaurant in a state bordering Wisconsin could have such poor interpretations of...

I can't rate the food as after waiting 45 minutes for just an appetizer we left. we wanted to play the quarter machine and when we handed one of the workers a $10 bill they brought us $2 and some change in quarters and said that was all they had, so while we couldn't play the quarter machine for very long we got to watch the workers and their friends young adults, we witnessed the workers hanging behind their friends's shoulders while their friends did pull tabs!! To start from the beginning, When we walked in it was absolutely not busy 2 people at a table and one fellow at a bar who got their meals and were able to wrap up and leave before we even got our appetizer, we had never been here before so we weren't sure what side of the restaurant to go to repeat on the right side as if there is an option we prefer not to sit at the bar when we peeked on the right side there was a worker just sitting on their phone who should have been at the front to direct us, he told us we couldn't sit in there, we walked back out to the reception area and had two more people who worked their walk by us until a worker finally showed us to the bar and dining area. We made our order fairly quickly we made an order of an appetizer that we wanted right away, all it was was french fries with gravy on them which was supposed to be their special that day as I stated above after waiting for 45 minutes with none of them even walking up to us and explaining why it it been so long we had...

We were here a year ago, the fried pickles were oily but tasted good. They are the same. Last year I rated our visit 5 stars.

This year I'm having a hard time giving it 1. Brendan was our server. This was the worst service we have had in the last 5+ years. Completely disinterested. The other 3 girls put forth more effort than he did. Messed up every aspect of our orders. We had to go looking for service twice. Empty drinks and missing food. The only time he was responsive was at tip time.

We always tip AT LEAST 20%, even on mediocre service. My husband was going to give him a dollar on a $130 bill, but he gave him $5 instead hoping he would have to share with the girls.

The croutons were burned. The fries were burned. The first order of cheese curds were cold. I was served my food separate from everyone else's.

We will NOT be going back. I know our business will not break them, but Sunday noon should be a time to keep customers, not lose them. Our son and his family live up here. I know he was...