501 On Main — Restaurant in Park City

Edit: I feel the need to come back to this review after a few weeks, I don't feel like I was fair to this restaurant, but I also wasn't critical enough. It's hard to explain what our experience was like, it was almost surreal when you are expecting to just get some food and end up in an existential crisis about the morality of not paying for your food if they never give you the opportunity. We sat down and ordered an appetizer, the quality was good, a bit under seasoned but, honestly, the food could have been blessed by Jesus Christ himself and it wouldn't change my rating. We had every intention of ordering actual meals, and to the waitresses credit, she came up to us relatively quickly to ask if we where ready to order. We said that we needed more time, apparently banishing all the staff to shadow realm. We sat.... and waited..... waited for long enough to decide that the food was not worth the wait nor the (quite high, even for Park City) price. Now comes the truly crazy part, we could not get a waitresses attention. I should have just walked up to the bar and asked for someone to bill us so we could leave, but I was curious to see how long it would take. Too long. Long enough for me and my wife to contemplate leaving without paying (and mind you, we even feel bad for jaywalking). After the waitress took drinks out to another customer, I was finally able to get her attention. Now to the point, who is this restaurant for? Overpriced food, poor service, under seasoned food, poor service and plenty of better restaurants to compete with it on old main street. Who is it for? Mindless consumers. It tricks the denizen shoppers of old main street to enter, it has the promise of fancy bistro food and booze. The person who seats you is outside in the middle of the sidewalk like a tantalizing fish hook with a bison burger bait. When you are seated and brought liquor you let your guard down. "Oh that's not so bad. I mean, it is Park City, haha" you say to yourself as you eye down the $20 hamburgers and $10 side salads. Then, the second you order something you have been committed to an hour of poor-to-no services. That's how this place survives, it suckles at the wallets of the vacuous boomers that go to park city to day drink and pretend that they are richer than they...

My wife and I were traveling to the Salt Lake City area for the 2017 doTERRA Convention and flew into SLC a day early to get settled in. We also wanted to take the day to do a little site seeing since neither of us have traveled to the state.

Park City was on our list and we're glad we took the trip. It's a beautiful drive from downtown SLC and lots to see and enjoy along the way. Once in Park City, we checked out Olympic Village and watched some aerobatic skiers practicing and took in the 360-degree view that the region has to offer.

But, we started to get hungry and it was time to find something delicious to nibble on before making our way back to check out some more sites - doTERRA's World Headquarters. We ended up at the 501 on Main after my wife saw lobster bisque on the menu. So, we stayed and had some lunch.

My wife went for their pick 2 lunch special and added a 1/2 house salad to go with her lobster bisque. The salad was a salad and the bisque was pretty tasty, but could have used a little more flavor and definitely some lobster chunks.

I on the other hand decided to go for something a little more filling, their rocky mountain buffalo burger, which by the way is on almost every restaurant menu in the state! Local raised bison with slices of red onions, crisp bacon, cheddar cheese, red leaf lettuce and tomatoes (which I left off). My burger had great flavor, very tender and very delicious.

Not a lot of breweries in the state of Utah, but of course I had to try something from the state. While at the 501, I decided to check out MOAB Brewing's Hefe. This was my first experience with what was going to be a trip filled with bland and boring craft beers... The little beer troll inside me started to cry...

Plenty of culinary options in Park City and I think we found a half decent one to start off with. But, would a positive culinary experience last for the duration of our trip? Not...

I heard so many good things about this place, I had such high hopes only to be more let down then a teenager who was stood up for prom.

First off let me state the good, the servers and hostess were AMAZING constantly checking on us and were patient in dealing with our large party. Another thing to note was the seared Ahi tuna was fantastic.

Now the bad. We had a large party of 8, and we ordered A LOT of food. We had spicy fried shrimp as a starter and I for the life of me couldn't taste anything remotely spicy, I've smelled black pepper with more spice than this shrimp. Then I personally ordered the bison burger, and let me tell you something, DONT. it was the driest thing I've tasted since attempting the cinnamon challenge when I was 14. The burger joint at Antelope Island has the best bison burger to date. Other memebers of my party ordered Pecan red trout, and the halibut which was also dry, almost like they dehydrated all the fish before putting it out. The only thing that had taste in the red trout was the pecan, we might have well just ate a butt load of pecans for a better taste. The halibut was so dry it could've been listed as jerky, probably would have tasted better as jerky too.

We ended up ordering 2 kids mac&cheese dishes, and I don't how you can mess up something as simply as noodles and cheese, but these chefs did. When a kid says his Mac is trash 🗑 you should probably fix yourself. The fries were the best part of our main dishes, and they were surprisingly simple as well, just some kind of cayenne chili powder spanked on all these little potatoes children.

Another icing on the cake was the price for draft beer, i love local drafts and hardly complain about the price of local Breweries. But when a pizza joint down the road has the same beer for 3 bucks cheaper, something smells fishy and its DEFINITELY not any fish cooked at this establishment.

10/10 would not...