the River House — Restaurant in Palm Beach Gardens

Hitting the Palm Beach 🏝️ area and getting together for a relative’s bday 🎂🎉🥳 @ this fancy-casual spot right next to the canal front… 🏞️just delivers…if you don’t want to spend that much money forget about it, because you will still end hungry and loose on money.

The setup morphs very easily from an elegant 🎩👒🎀👔to a social place to suit any occasion.

As appetizers, our party ordered several salads:

Ceasar 👑 Classic: grated parmesan, toasted ciabatta 🍞 croutons, which was disappointing, the dish was very small and it was just a mix of lettuce with some croutons, not worth it).

The Wedge 🥗 butter lettuce, chopped bacon, cucumber, egg blue cheese, or Thousand Island which was way better than the Caesar, but still not something I would recommend to order. It was just all the elements mixed in the bowl, again nothing special.

From all the entrees, I would just go with the Shanghai Shrimp 🍤 That consists of lightly battered jumbo shrimp tossed in sweet & spicy sauce, served with ponzu…(the sauce was on point and the shrimp were very crispy)

Another good appetizer was the Blue Point Oysters 🦪/ Connecticut…the tomato sauce and lemon spread really add a completely sophisticated flavor to eat. I'm not a fan of oysters, but these ones were very good because of the sauce.

Then we went with the entrees:

Crab Cakes 🦀🎂 jumbo lump crab, rémoulade sauce served with French fries. The crab cakes were small but very fresh. If you are very hungry order something else. The best part of it was the french fries 🍟 my favorite thing from all the order, you NEED to order them if you are a french fries fan. Precisely thin cut and fried.

Cedarwood 🐟 Planked Salmon with lemon 🍋 seasoning. Fresh and the lemon touch makes it a little bit bitter but blends very well.

Atlantic Salmon 🐠 pan-roasted served with roasted cauliflower 🥦 that didn’t have anything special.

Chicken 🐥Milanese With champagne beurre blanc, served with Fettuccine Alfredo. One of my favorite dishes ❤️… the chicken was on point, and the sauce super creamy and buttery. The fettuccine was al dente 👌🏻

Tavern Burger 🍔 two griddled patties, caramelized 🧅onion, American cheese, secret sauce (nothing so secret or special about it) / wouldn’t suggest it overall.

Primed Meatloaf 🍖served with whipped potatoes. Nice but not impressive. The meat was fresh, but not remarkably good.

Ribeye 🥩bathed in hotel d’ maitre butter and as a side a baked 🥔potato. The meat was super fresh and tender, but also nothing of a wao factor. The potato was really upsetting. Just a whatever potato baked and served.

Steak 🥩Frites 🍟, sliced steak house served with a delicious sauce verte that makes the dish unique and very flavorish as it adds a buttery touch to it. The french fries 🍟were thin-cut and super crispy, just how I ❤️them. Best dish to order. To me, it was the top winner, even though the meat was overcooked, still the verte sauce makes it very special.

We paired the food with a subtle Decoy wine 🍷

We brought a bday cake, so I can’t judge on desserts.

Service sometimes abandoned us and didn’t stand out.

Overall, this place really misses on being remarkable. It is very unfortante because the setting is ideal to take the customer to an unforgettable experience, but that’s not the case at all, especially considering the pricing, you can even feel you were robbed. 💁🏼

Suggestion: put more emphasis on food details and introduce...

By far the absolute worst restaurant experience ever -double OO review rating. Had brunch, my orange juice glass arrived with green fungus specs all over, Couldn’t get server for 20 minutes, Ordered avocado toast Requesting poached egg yolks to be soft, Yolks arrived rock hard, Couldn’t get server for another 20 minutes to replace dish, Despite half of the restaurant being empty, it took 20 minutes again of asking multiple people to get our check as our server was completely MIA, Check showed a double charge for the avocado toast, Waited another 20 minutes for the fourth time to get the attention of anyone to correct our bill. An overweight older woman With dark brown Hair, who was not our server Was sent over. When I asked for a correct bill, Instead of apologizing or saying something like she’ll get it, taken care of right away, She lashed out at me stating “oh it’s just a tiny little mistake. What’s the big deal?” When I pointed out to her the multiple problems and mistakes with the food and the service she yelled at me don’t talk to me that way. When I told her to stop raising her voice, she walked away, making faces at me. She arrived with a corrected. Bill made additional faces at me which I ignored. I paid my check, my friend, and I agreed that we would never come here again. House, I was writing a review another server kept looking over my shoulder to my cell phone and called the manager on us. The manager came over and wanted to know what was wrong. When I pointed it out to him. He rudely responded that the other server stated that I was swearing at him and that It was witnessed by another employee. When I suggested that he take a look at the cameras to see that that was not at all the case he refused to acknowledge my comment. As we stood up from the table to leave, I saw the earlier overweight server who had been making faces at me and having my cell phone right away available I took a picture of her. The manager then proceeded to tell us that we were trespassing and not to come back and followed and stalked us to all tge way the valet stand. I’ve been coming here for 20 years and watched it go downhill over the last several months, but this was by far the most unacceptable behavior I have ever come across at any restaurant. When the manager himself doesn’t know how to behave and treat customers with respect and dignity, How can one expect the servers to...

Gosh, really going downhill. I’ll mention only this most recent disappointing experience, primarily as a punctuation mark on the past two years of downhill developments.

New management protocols have created slow, ineffective, customer-unfriendly realities at the otherwise beautiful outdoor bar. Today, my friend and I ordered “Millionaire Deviled Eggs,” lobster bisque, Caesar salad, Greek salad and a tavern burger. The “Millionaire” eggs were strangely arranged with (I believe) five strips of sticky candied bacon arranged in a sort of star/swastika pattern on the middle of the plate. I jokingly asked, “What millionaire wants to crumble sticky candied bacon with their fingers?” The bartender laughed and said he could have the kitchen chop up the bacon. Thank you! A few minutes later, a rather flustered and obtuse young man presented with our rearranged plate of “Millionaire Deviled Eggs” with sticky candied bacon nicely chopped and sprinkled atop the eggs and announced, “If you want this again, you need to ask your server in advance.”

Say what?

Had I known from the menu that my “Millionaire Deviled Eggs” would require me to hand chop with my bare hands, I certainly would have possibly asked in advance for the kitchen to chop or to at least provide a French knife or, more likely, would not have ordered the $18 plate of manually dependent deviled eggs.

Here’s the thing: since when is a basic and I would argue, reasonable, request so offensive to a restaurant manager?

To distill his ire, I tried to switch the dialogue. He had an accent so I asked, having recently been on a vacation with several S Africans, “Are you from South Africa?” His reply (and this is a MANAGER), “Yeah, do you have a problem with that?”

So I’ll sum this up by saying millionaires or anyone, actually, probably do not enjoy hand-crumbling candied bacon to enjoy their appetizer and absolutely nobody enjoys a 20-something hostile bulldog of a manager telling them how to place an order.

Also, bar staff now have no access to condiments so if you want condiments with your burger, you should bring your own.

Sad decline of a once really...