17th Street Grill — Restaurant in Tustin

17th Street Grill, Tustin - Poor Customer Relations

The 17th Street Grill restaurant in Tustin should not be a place to visit until they change their attitude towards their customers! They are not customer friendly. They appear to suggest that in troubling situations, the “management is always right” and the “customers are always wrong”. Don’t pay a lot of money for food at this business when the management does not care about the customer.

In the past I have visited and dined at 17th Street Grill numerous times. I have had breakfast and lunch meetings with my colleagues, clients and associates. And, I have regularly recommended 17th Street Grill as a great place to meet and dine.

Unfortunately, I am rescinding my recommendation and discourage others from visiting 17th Street Grill due to the fact that the restaurant is no longer customer friendly. During the COVID pandemic, the restaurant was not regularly available. With the re-opening of restaurant and the greater flexibility of accommodating customers, I began to again dine and meet my guests for breakfast and lunch. September 9, 2021 was one of those luncheon visits. I and a colleague of mine had a two hour lunch at the restaurant. We asked to sit in the back corner area of the bar so that we would not be an inconvenience or disturbance to anyone. From the beginning of the lunch visit… no problem.

Then the General Manager (who later indicated that he is one of the owners) sat a group of six people next to us that were very boisterous. They were loudly laughing, yelling, joking, and partying. The result was that they were disturbing not only to our table, but also to the other tables around them. There was a table of six elderly ladies that were having a nice quiet lunch also next to us. They were also quite upset that the General Manager sat these loud people next to all of us. The General manager saw this as this boisterous group came in the front door of the restaurant and the servers noticed it also.

I did not want to be distracted from my own discussion with my colleague by the disturbance that was occurring. I ask to be moved to another booth and was moved. Everything was fine from that point on, although you could still hear the disturbances coming from their table. As I and my colleague left, the General manger called me aside and criticized me for being upset and wanting another booth. He stated, “17th Street Grill is for dining, it is not for you having breakfast or lunch meetings”. He berated me and embarrassed me in front of my client and others. He said, “I placed those people in that area because I did not want to disturb others in the restaurant and there was no other table for six people.” And the icing on the cake was that he stated “you are no longer allowed to dine at our restaurant… you are banned. Do not come back here again”.

This is not acceptable customer service. Joe Luby, the owner would have never said these words. No one should cater a business or a restaurant where the General Manager is a dictator and does not take responsibility or hold himself/herself accountable to his/her actions that are disturbing to others. You don’t solve a problem by throwing people out of your business. There is an old saying in business “if you want to maintain loyalty, the customer is always right”. What this means is “if the customer is unhappy about a product or a service, the business will try to fix the problem and make the customer happy”. It appears that at 17th Street Grill, this customer centric philosophy is not part of the service of this restaurant. If you want customer friendly service and want to meet in the same area, I would go over to Zov’s Restaurant instead of 17th Street Grill. You will get better service, better quality of food, and a management that is friendly and customer oriented.

I suggest that 17th Street Grill is no longer the restaurant to visit until they change their attitude about...

Came here for OC restaurant week. Will never come here again.

We should’ve suspected something was up when their restaurant menu was notably different from the one on the restaurant week website. The sea bass was replaced with a much cheaper rockfish, and the dry-aged ribeye was replaced with a normal one. These are both cost-saving changes but there was absolutely no notification about these changes nor was there any change to the price. This is sad but there’s nothing to complain about if the food is good.

So despite this, I decided to order a 14oz NY strip steak for $40. This would have been great dog food—no pepper, no salt, and greatly overcooked. Unfortunately, I am a human and therefore did not like it. I ordered it medium-rare but it arrived clearly medium-well (if I’m being generous). One can somewhat forgive this mistake with proper seasoning but unfortunately the steak was missing any seasoning whatsoever. They just threw a piece of butter on it afterwards (the steak was clearly not butter basted and clearly no herbs or spices were introduced at any point in the cooking process) and called it a day. I would be upset if I got served this steak at Denny’s for $10, let alone $40… the vegetables were also barely cooked and essentially unseasoned. The mashed potatoes were pretty good but I think I’d need more than 3 bites of mashed potatoes for $40.

You might think that the chef just screwed up on a single order but my friend also ordered the same item and it was equally unseasoned and overcooked. I guess they’re consistent at least?

Now, at this point, you might just think: “oh, so just the steak is bad”. I wish that was the case. My two other friends ordered a chicken parm and a clam linguine pasta, both standard dishes. Both of them were terrible. The chicken parm had no sauce and tasted like they cut apart some cherry tomatoes and poured the juice in to serve as the sauce. The clam linguine also had a very watery “sauce”.

The only outlier dish was the garlic knots, which (given the quality of the other dishes) was surprisingly edible. Given that we ordered 5 dishes and that one of them was edible, I give them 1/5 stars.

TL;DR: If you are thinking about coming here for a steak you should just visit PetCo and pick up some dog food for better value. If you have to come here then get the garlic knots and avoid the steak and pasta. Even better, just...

We have come here a few times the past month as is it close to our house. First time during happy hour the service was slow but at the least the waitress was apologetic. This last time was an absolute joke though. We sat at the last table available in the bar next to the door and soon realized that one door acted as a wind tunnel as everytime it was opened our napkins flew all over the place. We tried to put a chair by that door as there are two doors to hopefully steer people in not ruining our dinner, but our waitress, Amanda C, came and chastised us for not wanting wind blown at us every 5 minutes. She then used that door every single time she went by instead of using the other door. She just seemed like a miserable person after that and gave us the evil eye everytime she walked by so guessing something was wrong in her personal life or possibly the worst hire the service industry has ever made. Another waitress also used the door and when we asked if she could help us out and use the other door since things were flying all over the place she responded "it happens." I guess our waitress was offended that we didnt like sitting next to a wind tunnel as the manager had to come serve our food and she did not come back for the 30 more minutes we were there. We had to get up and ask the manager for the check and his response was just a sigh so was great to see that he cared how terrible our service was sarcasm. So, as you can imagine, we will not be eating there anytime soon and I highly reccommend anyone else to go elsewhere or expect...