Piedmont on Piedmont — Restaurant in Opelika

My family and I visited a few weeks ago. I have been in Opelika from out of state and we were all very excited to try out this new establishment. So excited, we cancelled reservations at Cafe 123. Unfortunately, the excitement ended quickly. I would also like to note I work in the service industry and another person in our four person group has opened several restaurants.

After we were seated, our server brought us sparkling water. When we ordered cocktails, one of us ordered a vodka soda. The server seemed very confused and said there was no "soda machine." Rather perplexed, we said they could use the sparkling water. We then asked our server if we could see the wine list. She said what we had was the wine list. This list involved two red wines (one $100+ bottle and one $40+ bottle) There were no options for white wine, but there was a bottle of vermouth listed because, you know, everyone drinks vermouth by the bottle. There were a few non-alcoholic wines as well.

We kept asking for a wine list and she said it was not possible. Not possible? Finally, Nelson came over and I really hoped the situation would improve. Instead, we were given a pretentious explanation of how they offer over 3,000 wines and they were waiting on the fancy paper to arrive. According to Nelson, the paper industry is being held hostage by the cartel. Aside from caring less about why they don't have paper to print an actual wine list on, we wondered why they don't simply have a QR code option or invest in a few iPads/tablets while the cartel is apparently disrupting the paper industry.

I'd love to say the experience improved from there, but it just kept getting more weird and much worse. We did get a bottle of wine that was decent and Nelson was very excited to have us try tastings of two more wines he was very passionate about. We were unaware we were being charged for the tastings. We would have probably still humored him with the samples despite the charge, but it seemed very underhanded when we took a closer look at the bill after our dining experience.

As for the food, nothing was bad, but nothing was great. We asked our server if the appetizer portions were enough for sharing. She said they were. They weren't. They were out of the sweet potato appetizer along with about 1/3 of the menu including the pasta carbonara. Maybe Piedmont on Piedmont should seriously consider having enough sweet potatoes, eggs, bacon, cheese, and garlic on hand if they plan to offer the most basic of Italian dishes.

At one point I used the restroom. Everything was fine until I stood up to flush the toilet. Above the toilet is a rectangular window and anyone could look into the restroom if they were at The Southerly.

Other observations were the GM, Adam, spent the majority of the evening looking at his phone and not helping out any of the staff that clearly didn't know a thing about anything. We even had to tell Adam to stock up the restroom because it was out of toilet paper and paper towels.

I've since seen Nelson give an oral dissertation on Instagram clarifying PoP is a wine bar, not a restaurant. If this place is a "wine bar," why do you have fancy marble slotted tableware to hold the silverware? If this is a wine bar, where is a legitimate wine list?

Lastly, I truly wanted to love this place and support a local business, but nothing at all was redeemable about my (and my family's) experience. Maybe Nelson and Adam will get their acts together, but I'm not holding out any...

We went tonight after making a reservation for 7:30 but arrived closer to 7 and were seated promptly. Let me start by saying that the restaurant is beautiful, It caught our eye last weekend from the street and we could not wait to try it. Like other reviews posted tonight, It pretty much fell flat from there. First our waitress greeted us promptly but was hurried as she was the only server in the entire restaurant. She was one of three staff members on the floor that I could see. One was a guy who I assume was the owner or manager, he was the one who sat us but he pretty much sat at a table by the bar drinking and on his computer. The other was I assume a wine sommelier or at least a passionate enthusiast who spent the majority of his time at a particular table talking with patrons about wine but he never once even looked our way. When our waitress came back she brought the drink/wine menu, It was the only menu in the entire restaurant and she kept having to shuffle it to other tables. And while they did have some interesting cocktails, the wine list was poor and listed no whites just a couple of reds and a desert wine and some vermouth. Again the other staff are in their own little world while she struggled to keep her head above water. We ordered 2 cocktails, the le vie en rose and the darling. Both were good. When she did make it back to us we ordered food but they were out of all but one type of pasta. Also I asked how the chicken was served and she just looked at me strange and said, "It's like a piece of chicken" I then clarified like is it grilled, blackened, or fried. She clearly needs training on the food she is serving and how it is prepared. Again this points to poor management. We ordered the soup and the brie ciabatta and two pastas. The food was good. But we could never get any wine to go with it. Our food was delivered but our waitress who is already drowning had to get us utensils. Again poor management. We asked for wine and she recommend one and we agreed but she never brought it. We also never got our water refilled. Again this is a systems issue. My suggestion is for wine enthusiast is to do less talking and actually develop a good wine list for those of us who know how to pick our own wine. Maybe help run some food, bring utensils, fill a water glass. It might be helpful to set utensils on the table before seating that table and maybe provide a water bottle at each table since you only have one server. Ideally you should have more servers on a Saturday night or at least help her. My hope is that this place can get it together but when management isn't out there on the floor supporting their overwhelmed and undertrained staff, it's going to be...

I want to preface by saying that I am also a server and have been at multiple restaurants and understand that some things are out of a servers control. I tipped our server 20% but these things need to be said. Piedmont has a fine dining atmosphere, I would compare it to Avondale or Sessions perhaps in terms of curating a very “upper class” environment, and it did feel that way. Getting everyone’s drinks took place in seceral stages. The first two drinks (out of a party of seven) came around 10 minutes after ordering. 5-7 minutes later cane the second group of drinks, and then finally about 6-7 minutes after that was when our party got the rest of their FIRST round of drinks. By this time several of us had begun to drink our drinks that had been ordered around 25 minutes ago. There were around 20 people in the restaurant, and several service workers. It took another ten or so minutes for our server to ask about our dinner orders. We placed our dinner orders, but, our server had to come back three times to verify our orders. I noticed that this may be because the servers are not allowed to use server books. This made it unfair on the server who had to memorize seven people’s orders. We did not fault him, however, it was not a good look to see our server have to come back several times to make sure our order was correct. Piedmont should correct this and have some sort of cute server book, or some other more efficient way to keep track of orders. When we finally were done with dinner, our server said it would be seven (verbatim) minutes for our checks. It took around fifteen minutes. When he brought our checks, it was split incorrectly, When our checks were brought again, my friend was charged for a bellini and a petal and thorn. She ordered an espresso martini and petal and thorn. My friend ordered roasted potatoes ($12 on their menu, which we brought to the server) and was charged $16 for her potatoes. It took about thirty minutes to finish processing our checks, and when a friend had given her card, our server returned it to the wrong table and had to motion for him to bring it over to us. The food is overpriced. The drinks are overpriced. The service is unorganized. I hesitate to place this on the fault on the server as servers often have very little say. I am very critical of the managers and owners. Our reservation was for 6:30 and we did not leave until 9 due to the consistent issues and long wait times we were facing. I would not recommend drinking or dining here. Please...