Charlie Palmer Steak Napa — Restaurant in Napa

I would recommend this restaurant because of food and atmosphere. It was beautiful and the food was lovely. If you don’t need anything specific, it’s perfect. We were sat at a nice big table that was nicely decorated. The Napa neighborhood menu was soooo good. Very impressed with the variety and price.

The service was a problem due to overlooking important details. I booked a Monday night dinner with my retreat group months in advance. I requested a few things that I thought would make the dinner smoother and give a nice experience to my guest. My two request were to only have the Neighborhood Menu available on the tables as that would be our primary menu. My second request was to have a chef come speak to your table about the local connection of the menu items since they were uniquely locally curated items. To my surprise there were full menus for everyone when we sat and only 2 neighborhood menus. I rounded those up and we asked for more neighborhood menus. We had a group of 7 and only had 4 menus to order from. Although it was clear we would not be ordering from the full menus the waiter went into presentation mode to talk about the soup of the day and chefs fish of the day. Neither of these are on the neighborhood menu so it was not necessary for our group. Since I noticed no chef came out I asked if the waiter could tell us about the menu. His response was dismissive where he said “it pretty self explanatory”. Because of this everyone kept asking if could explain what each dish was as we ordered because they simply didn’t fully know. He would answer the questions with no problem when asked. However, this would have been much smoother had they even tried to honor my request to have a chef speak briefly with the group about the menu and its connection to the area. Our waiter also used words that could be interpreted as condescending. He asked were we there on business and we said no a retreat. He said “o just a little retreat.” That would go on but as the night progressed it just seemed to be a part of his personality.

I made this reservation with several catering and group management staff from the hotel. They all were very helpful in acknowledging that my requests would be no problem for the restaurant. I even added my request to the formal reservation on open table. It was highly disappointing that those things simply were not done and made the dinner a little off at moments. Not a huge deal but again it was the lack of detail on their end that really...

Update: Charlie Palmer replied to say they would follow up, they never actually followed up with us

We came here tonight for our anniversary dinner. We’ve been to Charlie Palmer Steakhouse before in a different state (my wife used to work for them). We had an expectation from the previous experience that was not even close to being met. Overall the food was actually quite good, our steaks were cooked and seasoned perfectly.

However, I can say this was one of the worst dining experiences I’ve ever had. The server was very unfriendly and seemed almost annoyed with the fact that we were there. We felt super rushed to order which was fine as we had looked at the menu before coming in but that is not what I would have expected from a fine dining experience. It was also really odd to tell our server thank you multiple times only to be ignored each time. We were just trying to be gracious guests, it was really bizarre.

We ordered some cocktails and an appetizer which were all great. But before we could even get through the cocktails or appetizer our steaks were at our table. We would have loved to order some wine to have with our steaks but we weren’t even given an opportunity to. The whole experience just felt really rushed. And talking to my wife, she said when she worked at Charlie Palmer that they would anticipate about 2 hours for their guests and really tried to make sure it didn’t feel rushed. We were in and seated at 8:35 and walking out at 9:30 (even with dinner cocktails, appetizers, entrees, the whole bit). I would have loved to feel like we were able to sit and enjoy our meal, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. If we had been given more time we would have loved to order a bottle of wine and dessert, but it felt like we were just an annoyance. Overall we were super disappointed to have celebrated our anniversary at Charlie Palmer this year, and honestly I don’t see us going back which is a huge bummer since we used to love it. But the overall experience and service left a lot...

This is a Happy Hour review. We were pretty disappointed other than the nice waiter we had. I’ve never eaten a meal here but am local and had previously heard people locally recommending the Happy Hour for food at the bar area - especially their hamburger. Unfortunately, apparently management has been making changes to the menu for happy hour. Buyer beware - and especially locals who are accustomed to Happy Hour here. There is a very nice selection of Small Plates on the bar menu and Small Plates are said to be half off from 4-6. BUT, you’d better read the fine print and look carefully for the tiny letters saying “HH” by only 3 of the Small Plates. It isn’t explained that that means no other Small Plates are eligible for happy hour. You find out when your bill arrives that you are being charged full price. We were later informed the menu has been altered a few times recently to have fewer and fewer of the items designated by the tiny “HH”. Aside from that, two of the dishes we ordered with cheese on the side came covered with cheese and had to be remade. The hamburger - ordered well done - came out pink and oozing in the middle. Portion size of my Hamachi ($22) was indeed “Small” as was the Heirloom tomato salad. To say we were disappointed is an understatement. The saving grace was our waiter who listened to our concerns and corrected the problems. I learned a good lesson. We will stick with our locally owned restaurants. I hope management reads this and realizes that locals will be particularly aggravated by not being adequately informed about loss of eligibility of items on the small plates menu from 4-6. I’d encourage a restructuring of the menu so it is clear. As is, it came across to us as deceptive. Remember that when the tourist crowds die down during the lean months, it’s the locals that sustain...