Jackalope's Bar and Grill — Restaurant in Oakhurst

We stayed at Tenaya Lodge for 2 nights, 03/31/22 - 04/02/22. The night of 3/31 (Thursday) we went to Jackelope for dinner and had an AMAZING experience!! Excellent food, amazing service, everything cooked to perfection! Our water glasses were constantly being filled, lots of attention from our server, and overall a great vibe. They accommodated a no-dairy request on one of the dishes (roasted chicken, usually cooked in butter) and it didn't sacrifice any flavor or anything. The chicken and rigatoni in pesto was incredible, we were so happy with everything!

We loved everything so much we decided to go back to Jackelope for our second night (4/1, Friday). This experience was very different.. Our server was great, and she really took care of us through the issues that occurred. However the chef must have been totally different or someone else was handling our order in the kitchen. Our appetizer (calamari, we also got this on our first night and it was amazing) was greatly overcooked (dark color, rubbery, hard to chew) our second night. We are not ones to send things back, but this was rough. So we requested it to be remade and our server totally understood. She brought the second one back and.. it was the same. But after spending the day hiking in the valley we were starving and we definitely weren't going to send anything back twice. Our server agreed that everything looked the same as the first overcooked one and she kindly took this off of our bill. The entrees we received also were just.. not as great as the ones we received the prior night. We ordered different things but the flavor and level of cooking was not the same. Mine was bland, and my partner's was over seasoned to the point that again, it was rough to eat.. Additionally our water was left empty for a very long period of time, which was just so different from our experience prior. If we had had this 2nd night experience during our 1st visit, we would not have returned.

I will say that our service the second night was wonderful. She did comp the appetizer and the dessert for us, she was very understanding, but overall it is just difficult to make up for a really rough dinner experience. Especially with what we had experienced the prior night, it was a total opposite.

We are from out of town, so when we visit Yosemite again I don't think that we'll return...

AVOID. Had THREE absolutely abysmal experiences at Jackalope's a few weeks ago. Many of our dishes were inedible and the service was poorly trained and couldn't complete basic requests. Extremely overpriced for a terrible meal. I don't understand how this place has 4.1 stars on Google. It's currently a 3.2 on Yelp, which feels more accurate.

We were staying at the lodge with family and were hoping this would be a convenient place to eat. We unfortunately ended up eating here 3 times because we were tired after hiking and every time was awful

Terrible food highlights - The vegan pasta alfredo tasted like it had gone bad. WHY would a restaurant choose an ALFREDO pasta to be their vegan dish when they don't serve any other pastas. The couscous was an entirely new texture - both mushy and hard, grit-like in consistency. The pancakes had both a hard outer edge and a rubbery middle and were clearly reheated from a previous day. The pancakes was part of their $25 breakfast buffet, which was a huge rip-off. If a restaurant is trying to pinch pennies on pancake batter, it really makes you wonder what else they're skipping on. Multiple servers named the Jackalope burger as their most popular item, but we felt it was pretty mediocre for the price. If you have to eat here, the spinach dip, chicken wings, and brussels sprouts are good.

Service - Twice, the hosts struggled to understand that we were a party of 8 adults and 1 toddler who needed a high chair, and kept trying to seat us at a table meant for 6 people. Our waiters were similarly untrained - we were celebrating a birthday and we had to ask multiple times to confirm if the cake we pre-ordered was in the kitchen. One of our servers also said they hadn't bothered to learn the menu because they weren't scheduled for enough shifts, so they couldn't answer any of our questions.

Avoid at all costs. Drive to Oakhurst (~20 mins away) for a far better meal at literally any...

I’ve been staying at the lodge where this restaurant is located for several days and had multiple trips to Jackalope’s now for breakfast and dinner.

The lodge itself is beautiful and the restaurant (Jackalope’s) is no exception. Great ambience.

The first night I was here I ate dinner. The appetizer wings were good, but the main courses were really poorly cooked, especially for the price. In my party, they managed to mess up a pasta (how do you mess up noodles?), undercook a steak, and send out a couscous side dish that could have been mistaken for paste. It was all glued together, cold, and didn't have any seasoning or other semblance of flavor. We had to ask the waiter multiple times any time we needed something. The waiter would check in regularly, but would have forgotten what we asked for the last time they checked in. Some of the food was ok, but a lot of it was really embarrassing for the price it’s being sold at.

Then on another day, I tried the breakfast. The buffet is pretty pricy ($25) so expectations are high, despite me knowing that they had already served us subpar dinners. I should have gone in with lower standards. The pancakes felt dystopian. The outside ring of them was very hard and everything on the inside tasted like rubber. They were also cold. This was at 8AM. How do you mess up pancakes like that? If they had boxed, frozen Ego waffles to stick in a toaster, that would’ve been a significant upgrade in quality.

Thankfully they do have some prepackaged options like muffins that aren’t made in house. Their cooking is brutal.

Some of the courses were ok, the burgers were decent. But for the price you’re paying, you’re basically flipping a coin on if you get something you enjoy eating or...