Vessel Kitchen — Restaurant in Sandy

Let me start out with my wife would probably give it 5 stars… however there is too much of that healthy stuff for me on the menu.. my wife and daughter loved their dishes. The chicken and grains bowl to me was very -eh- but my daughter loved it. My wife got the citrus salad and said it was very good but may have had too many beets for her liking. I couldn’t get myself to try it, something about my very bland tastebuds I guess. As for me I ordered off of the 3 sides menu.. yup, you guessed it, mashed potatoes and double mac&cheese! Maybe a few suggestions: The way it it set up, you walk on and see a menu with plenty of things to eat, but when you mix in all that healthy stuff and call it a entree it’s difficult for guys like me to see any of it as appetizing. Anyway, as you walk down the line you can see all the food as you walk to the register where you order and again there are plenty of edible foods that you can clearly see, but it is not set up like cafe rio, where you can walk down the line and say I want some of that and that. So after much bla bla bla, my suggestion: it would be nice if it were cafe rio style where I could just walk down the line and get what I want and enjoy it. As for now, and I think the can speak for other husbands with my taste buds and still want to support their wife, if I return my menu choice would still be Mac&Cheese and mashed potatoes the way it is setup. They are very tasty by the way! Oh, one more quick note.. you should teach your employees how to adjust the feet on the bottoms of the legs on each table, as they are all very annoyingly wobbly.. take a quick peak at the bottom side of the legs and you should find little adjustment feet to fix the...

On paper I should love this place. Healthy, hipster-esque, eco-conscious food is sort of my jam.

In practice, it's a pretty high price for small portion sizes (~$24 for dinner for 2 with no drinks). This would be ok if the food had wowed me...but it didn't. Their naan tacos with falafel and hummus were okay, but nothing to write home about. Their beets and Brussels sprouts were less exciting than what I could throw together at home. The only vegan/vegetarian option they have for protein is falafel, which was also just okay, nothing to write home about (I'm not vegetarian, but my wife is, and I eat vegetarian most of the time)

Their menu fails to recommend winning combinations, leaving you as the customer to figure it out. I suppose you could ask an employee for recommendations, but the whole "walk past all the food and talk to the cashier to order while a line piles up behind you" makes that VERY uncomfortable. I don't know if it was a staffing issue at this location or what, but their serving process really should mirror Cafe Rio, Zao, etc where they're serving as you move through the line, and then doing a ring up at the end. It would also be helpful if they had more than a short opportunity for me to see the (huge, confusing) menu before I hit the point of just ordering blindly.

Overall: I really wanted to like this place. Maybe in a vacuum it would be higher ranked for me. But it's right across the street from Zao, who have their process figured out, a menu that makes sense, and tofu that I usually choose over the meat options because it's DANG GOOD, and prices that end up 20% lower for a more...

This place shows up in searches for gluten-free restaurants, and it even identifies their menu items as "contains gluten", but they have two major problems for people who have to avoid gluten (celiac disease, for example). 1, there is a MAJOR risk of cross-contamination as all the gluten-free items are side-by-side with the gluten-containing items, and there's a lot of food droppings around each container. Second, their identification of gluten-containing items is incomplete, as they fail to indicate the risk of gluten cross-contamination in their oats and the wheat gluten present in soy sauce. The food might be good, but their effort for being gluten-conscious is really pathetic and could use work.

Update: thank you for your response, I didn't know that about your soy sauce, but then, neither did the staff there. My first point still stands: the gluten-free corn and mushroom dishes that looked appetizing to me were right next to the non-gluten-free mac-n-cheese. It's just really inconceivable for a cafeteria-style presentation with all the dishes sitting out together to be gluten-free, unless the restaurant is 100% gluten free. Steps could be taken, however, to separate items more, which would certainly...