Nate's on Marsh - A NRL Food Group Restaurant — Restaurant in San Luis Obispo

I hate to write negative reviews, but I feel obligated to share what a terribly disappointing experience I had here, since I felt so led astray by all these great reviews.

My fiancé and I wanted to have a special dinner out to celebrate my new job. We are locals, fine dining lovers, and we were so excited to try this place out.

Our visit started off well enough with a friendly greeting from the host and an on-time table right by the window, but it was all downhill from there.

We ordered the chopped la scala salad to start, followed by the octopus appetizer. The salad was mostly iceberg lettuce with a few scattered pieces of sun dried tomato and salami, and a paltry half piece of burrata. The dressing was overly acidic and unbalanced.

The salad was whisked away just as we finished our last bites and immediately replaced by the octopus before we even had fresh silverware. The octopus was a bit rubbery and dry, and the potatoes were mushy and under seasoned. The whole dish seemed like it had been sitting under a heat lamp for too long.

A few bites into the octopus we were encouraged to place our order for the next course as they were about to seat a large table. We gratefully complied and ordered the cacio e pepe pasta. However, it seems our order somehow didn't make it to the kitchen in time.

Over 45 minutes later, with no check in from our server or the manager, we were presented with a small, sad pile of buttered noodles with a single crack of black pepper over the top.

Our server finally appeared to ask how we liked the dish and we glumly replied that it was incredibly bland and quite disappointing. He condescended that it was "just black pepper and parmesan", a statement which anyone who knows and loves cacio e pepe would scoff at. It's a deceptively simple dish but requires a high level of technique, and when done correctly is full of flavor.

Just a few moments later he checked in with the table beside us, who had ordered two different pasta dishes, and they had the same feedback. Bland. After the server left, the gentleman at the table turned to us and asked, "Was your food tasteless too?" and we bonded over the bitter disappointment of an unimpressive, yet expensive, night out.

Our check was delivered with everything on it, and when it was returned with our card, we were given a $25 giftcard, with hopes that we would "return again soon". Unlikely.

Here is the worst part: On our way out the door, the person I can only assume is the manager, possibly even the owner, was sitting having a drink at the bar and waved us out casually, wishing us a good night. He had never stopped by either of our tables to follow up on our complaints.

There are two elements that make up an exceptional fine dining experience: food and service. Nate's utterly failed on...

We arrived 5 minutes early for our 7pm reservation on Friday night. They had us wait until 7:15pm to be seated. They seated us at a high top table left of the bar, in the back corner, beside the wine rack wall. Throughout the course of dinner, the bartender would come over to our table and reach across us to get bottles off the wine rack. It was such that we were asked to contort to move out of his way, so he could fetch wine bottles beside us from the rack. It is unacceptable that there is even a table in this location, and that they would seat anyone at it, and believe it is okay to have guests move aside while dining, so they can retrieve wine bottles.

As for the food, it was incredibly subpar, and lacking in execution. The fact that this place is listed on the Michelin Bib Gourmand is absurd, because the execution of their dishes was amateur and appallingly bad. We started with the Chopped La Scala salad. It was over dressed, and soggy, as if they served us leftovers from the bottom of the salad bowl. We had the Rigatoni Bolognese. The pasta was al dente, and the sauce was way too salty. There was no complexity to the flavors--just plain salty. The Niman Ranch Ribeye was equally disappointing. It was drowned in a way-too-salty sauce, which tasted nothing like peppercorn, and the steak was both chewy and sinewy; the shoestring fries were also on the saltier side. The broccolini was so lightly blanched that it was hard. As for desert, the chocolate torte was pretty dense and more like fudge. We had the Grand Champion cocktail, which did shine, while the lavender cocktail just tasted like medicine.

Our waitress was great, but unfortunately, she works at a pretty pathetic institution.

Overall, the dinner and experience here was not only bad, but given where they seated us, blatantly disrespectful. I would strongly not recommend it. It is one of the worst restaurant experiences we've had in SLO, and the quality of the food was an absolute letdown. Go to...

We were so excited to try this place, but it was just a little underwhelming. The decor, ambiance, and vibe is AMAZING. The food was all just alright. Our favorite thing was the Caesar salad, so cheesy and good dressing amount. We got 2 cocktails that were both good, but nothing special. For food we got the: pappardelle ragu and mushroom carbonara.

The pappardelle was a 4/5 the pasta and lamb was great but the sauce was a bit too tomatoy (just not a lot more flavor than tomato) but the meat was so good and again the pasta was so fresh we loved it. The mushroom carbonara though, was not our favorite, probably a 2.5/5. It was unfortunately the texture you never want carbonara to be it wasn’t creamy and the sauce didn’t stick to the noodle, it was that chalky almost scrambled egg like texture. The pancetta was amazing in it, but the mushrooms didn’t really add anything and maybe took away from the flavor a bit, and we love mushrooms so we were so excited. Additionally we got the spumoni cake and it was pretty good! I loved the pistachio and chocolate portions, but the cherry was sorbet rather than a creamy cherry which was not what I totally wanted. It also had the regular maraschino cherries rather than the amarena which was disappointing. Overall our evening and food was good, not great. Probably won’t come back as we are not locals, but it was a super cute and romantic spot especially around the holidays! Oh and service was pretty good just...