Amuse Restaurant VMFA — Restaurant in Richmond

Disclaimer: Wonderful establishment, great food. However... Today is Friday July 9th and I visited the restaurant at 5pm. I was discriminated against by a host. I did not care to ask for her full name. Details: I requested seating for 1 as I normally do. I was told that there was no seating available, and I wouldn’t be able to be served today as they were all booked up. No offer of later service, no wait time, no contact request, just no service. I walked around the exhibits and returned as this was the first time I had received this type of response from the restaurant. On the second interaction there seemed to be a change in if I could be seated or not. The host gave a reluctant pause, looked at her computer and said “yea, no seating, you’ll just have to come again another day”. I said that this was the first time I was not being seated and given no options other than come other day and I wanted to be sure that I was being told the truth and not being discriminated against. She told me she’d rather have “cool” guests like me in the restaurant at any given time. I did not understand. I asked if could I speak with a manager. And she said what most all people providing bad customer service say. “The manager is in a meeting”. And we all know why people say that. After feeling slighted, I returned a 3rd time, she said she could take my number and call me if a table became available. She shakily wrote my name and number on a paper. 10 min later I received a phone call that I could be seated at anytime that I want to come in that evening. I had the curry fried oysters, Cabernet, and...

We came here for brunch on Sunday. I only wish it opened at 11 instead of 11:30. Good thing we got here a couple minutes before it opened because we did not have reservations. The restaurant went from being empty to almost full very quickly!

Our server was informative and did a great job. Their brunch menu had some good choices. A welcome surprise was complimentary chunks of soft bread with fruit in it, one for each of us that came out before our meal.

For brunch, we went with the quiche and the stuffed apple French toast. Portions were much bigger than expected! Very generous. The quiche was divine— so soft and it practically melted in your mouth. It came with some salad greens.

Stuffed French toast was like a sandwich, and it also came with bacon and tiny square-shaped cut apples around it. Dessert was the chocolate tarte which was a square shaped chocolate mouse with raspberry sauce around it and a scoop of cream with a raspberry on top. It’s one of my favorite brunch...

The food at Amuse is simply divine. The waitstaff member that handle our table was awesome! She was tipped well! Thank you for your professional service! The overall atmosphere at Amuse is nice, comfortable. This was our 3rd time dining at Amuse. We had a great time celebrating our Mother's birthday, except for the two girls posted up at the concierge desk that were gawking at the table of African American women the whole time. It's the calling security on our Mother's Birthday Balloons, telling her she had to "leave them at the concierge desk for security to walk them down himself, from fear that they would set off the sprinkler system. And that we could wait for them (our Mother's birthday balloons) downstairs" and then security returning the flower and candy attached to them damaged and dismantled that gets Amuse the one star. We frequent VMFA often. We won't come again to Amuse, though. And we will tell everyone we know how we were treated today. It's 2023, Do Better and...