Hook & Line — Restaurant in Santa Cruz

My second time here, first time opening week we sat at the bar and had outstanding cocktails and raw bar items. This time we wanted to sit in the dining room so we made a reservation ahead, but unfortunately when we arrived we were seated in the bar area again alongside people standing at the bar coupled with the lower ceiling in that section makes it extremely loud + the patrons behind us were boisterous and obnoxiously loud, which obviously is not something restaurant can control but definitely affected our experience. Reservations should be seated in the dining room. The bar area should be for walk-ins, this is pretty much industry standard. We were seated immediately, but it took almost 10 minutes to be offered water or be checked in on by staff. FOH Service was very friendly, but perhaps too casual for over $100 per person and definitely could use some fine-tuning and a lesson in efficiency and hospitality to meet the caliber of the F&B program.

Cocktails were fantastic again. The house of leaves is one of the best things we’ve drank in recent years. I love that they have Hungarian red wines such as Kadarka and kekfrancos, but I hope they will help these be successful and accessible to new audiences by offering bottles for less than $80 or pours by the glass. The Pet-nat spritz was delicious and great that they use local Birichino Malvasia as the base, however the glass was over filled with ice leaving no room for the drink i bought. :-/

Fried anchovies are typically one of my favorite dishes and I appreciated they were not overly battered, but they were not fried correctly so they were soggy instead of crispy and bones not brittle enough to chew as easily as they should be.

The halibut with quinoa and delicata squash and greens was fantastic. It was deceiving as it was extremely flavorful and cooked perfectly but looked very “healthy” and plain. The scallops were also delicious and cooked exceptionally. However, I would’ve appreciated a more substantial mushroom/leek/cauliflower base that was not...

update We did share our negative experience with the team at this restaurant after our dinner wass over. They did agree for us to come back but we just couldn't bring ourselves to follow through and return. As a local teacher spending hard-earned money on a lovely dinner. I just feel so angry about this place. I hate feeling ripped off and I also hate when restaurants cater to food writers who are visible in the community and then treat everyone else like they are garbage with disgusting food that is so overpriced. I've had some bad meals before and just let it go and walked away but for some reason I'm just not able to move past the absolutely terrible food served at this restaurant. Not one single food item that came out was good. Get it together Hook and Line.

... Holy Snapper Pants! This is the most overhyped underperforming restaurant I've come across in oh so long.

Everything was gloopy gloppy, under cooked, underwhelming and slow as hell to come out. I cannot believe they are charging $43 for three baby scallops. Are you joking me?!

Ceviche was just a bunch of fish cubes covered in lemon juice with some weird piece of mushy sweet potato thrown in.

Staff was nice and attentive but they can't do much when the prices are Sky High and the food is disgusting.

I would maybe stop in for a drink but I would definitely eat somewhere else.

I feel particularly salty about this restaurant since it opened to a huge fanfare from a well-known and highly visible food writer in our town. There is a reason that some food writers remain anonymous so they can fairly judge a restaurant and present accurate information to their readers. This restaurant obviously pulled out all the stops for the food writer. But when the average person, let's say the average teacher, comes in for a lovely meal out and is instead served really gross food for a very high price. It's...

My partner and I came for their NYE preset menu. For $100 you get a 4 course meal. We were grateful to be seated as walk-ins and had high hopes. Unfortunately, the whole experience was like pulling teeth from the moment we’re were sat. Took well over 15 minutes to be greeted by our server and brought water. They apologized and we ordered right away because at this point we were pretty hungry. My drink, a dirty martini, took about 30 minutes to come out from after we ordered. We were pushing over an hour of being sat, which at this point, none of our courses had made their way to our table. Our server finally brought our second course and we notify them we never received our first course. They apologize and offer bread on the house. Kind of comical. The manager came by to say there was a fiasco in the kitchen. My partner and I don’t make a big stink out of this and are very understanding because we know how these things can be. Our main course takes another 20 minutes.

This experience with the service would have been overlooked if the food was great but the food was sadly, incredibly average. Plus we ate on a starving stomach so that says something. The cod with gnocchi was the most disappointing. It was acidic and fruity which didn’t compliment the pan fried gnocchi. The presence of a creamy sauce would have been more balanced. The short rib was better but the sauce, which holds most of the flavor for the dish, was nothing special and desperately needed salt. Our other courses consisted of the smoked trout (good), oyster (good), kampachi crudo (my partner’s favorite), cod & potato croquettes (my favorite), apple tart and eggnog pana cotta, both were flavorless...