Caboose Brewing Company & Tavern — Restaurant in Vienna

I made a reservation using their Yelp Reservations! The place is super cute! The parking is limited though. They sit off the W&OD Trail, most of their clientele were within walking/biking distances. I liked the rustic, industrial expression of design, fixtures and serving plates. There is a patio that was puppy friendly with a lot of bikers, runners and walkers filling it.

Inside, we waited to check-in for our reservation. Side-Note, this is a brewery; there isn't really a "separate dinning" area that is set aside from the normal brewery feel of tall ceilings and loud echoing, single open shared space, that you get from going to a brewery. We were seated and given menus. Our server was very cherry and welcoming! She brought us water that was room temp, poured from a refilled wine shaped bottle. While we had her, we asked for a sampler of beers so we could decide on what food to have. We also asked if one of the small plates could be made without an ingredient. When the beer flight was delivered by her, she had forgotten to ask about the small plate; placed the beers down, apologized and ran back to the kitchen. We were thirsty at this point and had already decided on another dish during the wait, so we started drinking our flight.

When she returned, we thanked her for checking, however we had already decided on our dish during the wait of the beer flight. We ordered the chef choice board ($22), where the chef chooses two cheeses for you and one of the meats for you. Out of the three choices of meat they had, you automatically get the Ham as one and have once choice between the salmon and the pate. Since we were originally going to order the salmon and pate, we ordered a side order of the pate ($7) and choose the salmon for the board.

When the dishes came out, we received 2 orders of pate, ham and two cheeses. We were delicate with drinking our samplers so that we could reserve it to meld with our dish. Meanwhile, I couldn't hear my date talk. I simply stared at him attempting to read his lips, meanwhile my eyes wandering over to the joggers that were sitting on the table tops on the patio and a child to the left of our table banging, constantly, on the huge glass window that over looked the patio. We found our server and exclaimed how we didn't get the salmon we had ordered. She was very apologetic and said that she would go to the kitchen to clear it up.

She checked on us when the salmon came out and we each ordered a beer. The beer took a very long time to come to the table. When it arrived, I was close to being finished with our food, and my date had already called it quits. Also, by the time she came back with my beer, she exclaimed that they didn't have the beer he had ordered. Not sure why it took that long to determine they didn't have it. We put the credit card out right after his new beer was delivered. Another 10 minutes or so went by and we grabbed our waitress who as she was walking to the table to the left of us to hand her the card for the check we had not received yet.

Overall our dinner was an hour and half, with most of it waiting. I think the concept of the brewery is really cool and even mentioned to my date that we should bike/jog here for a pint. I really enjoyed the cheeses, pate and salmon; but I DID NOT enjoy it in an environment where I couldn't even hear my date talk to me or myself think. If the restaurant part of this brewery was secluded and quieter, without LARGE distractions, I could see us paying those prices again. I was on a lunch break from my 12 hour shift, and left this "date-night" feeling drained, when I had come here to relax.

If you enjoy specially crafted Beers, they have a wide variety to choose from. The cider, I really enjoyed, as it is not you're typically over sweetened "mead-like" cider. It was very refreshing, crisp and apple-puck like. I also really enjoyed the Darkened Heart beer! It was full bodied, easy and smooth to drink. I wouldn't mind popping in for a...

So, with some of the other reviews, my experience might be an outlier, but this was possibly some of the worst service I've had from a restaurant in a while. I have never (at least in my memory) left a review anywhere, but my experience here inclined me to do so for the first time.

When we walked in, we were briefly ignored until someone yelled from across the room "Can I help you?". This on its own isn't that big of a deal, but seemed very off putting from the usual introduction when you enter a restaurant and made us seem like we had interrupted some private party.

Once we sat down, we were pretty much left alone. Mind you, it was not overly busy when we were there, there was maybe 12 customers (including us), with at least 3 wait staff, and another 3 people behind the bar (unsure of their specific roles). Even if it was just the 3 waiters, there were only 4 tables that needed to be served (including us). Essentially meaning 1 waiter per table.

After 15 minutes, someone finally introduced themselves and filled our water glasses, and said they "would be right back to take our order". Not only did this individual never return, another party of 2 came in around this time, our waiter sat them, filled their water, and took their food and drink orders (!) Within 5 minutes. We had been given nothing in 15 minutes except water. I'm glad that party had a better experience than us.

After another 10 minutes (25 minutes with no food or drink orders being taken and only being spoken to once) we were deciding to leave. At this time, someone other than who we thought was our server (and was someone who sat behind the bar the entire time) noticed us and ran up and asked if we were "ready to order" as if we hadn't had our menus down for a solid 20 minutes at this point. We just decided to order drinks while we searched for a different restaurant to go to, not wanting to continue the experience of being ignored.

Our drinks came relatively quick (I think they may have realized they forgot about us for 25 minutes), by a completely different person than the first 2, who apologized and said they "tried to make it over here earlier", so I think this is who our actual waiter was supposed to be? But regardless, this individual was seemingly tasked with only 1 other table from what we had observed over the last 30 minutes. It was pretty ridiculous to be pretty blatantly ignored/forgotten about, when the restaurant was near empty, with almost as many employees working as people in the restaurant. I will say, the beers we had were great, and the food everyone else around got looked good as well.

I think of myself as a very patient and understanding person, hence why we still waited so long before deciding to leave when others would probably not wait half as long. I also understand that it was New Years, but to literally be ignored, while there were very few other patrons, none of whom seemed to have the same experience, felt insulting and uninviting, especially with 5 or 6 employees seemingly just hanging out behind the bar (if they were busy, I apologize for involving them but it just didnt seem like it from what we saw).

No matter what the reason was as to why we were ignored, 25 minutes seems inexcusable, even at a busy time. For anyone curious, the party that was seated about 10 minutes into our waiting, got their food when we got our drinks, so I guess expect around 20 minutes service time if you don't get...

This place is so overrated. The food tasted very generic, portions are very small and ridiculously marked up. It is following the DC area ripoff milennials model where you end up still hungry with a 100+ dollar check. This is the town of Vienna, not DC nor Manhattan where those prices are slightly justified because of how expensive the cities are. The menu is poor (tiny expensive portions of cod or pork belly were the only proteins--and the vegetarian selections were uninspired and even more overpriced) and beer selection just average. Also, it is absurd you can have burgers only for a few hours one day a week--we understand that this style is "a thing" but being that this is a brewery, in a warehouse, in Vienna,full of people in bike shorts, we were expecting some food of which one might possibly fashion a nutritionally complete meal that tastes good. If you want to be trendy, try again,you're about 10-15 years late to the pork belly party. Serving traditional "poverty foods" at a huge mark-up just means you're ripping off your customers while pricing traditional global consumers of these innards and off cuts out of the market. The last thing the DC area needs is more trendy locavore food that takes ingredient sourcing (which does matter, to a point) as a substitute for taste, technique, nutrition, and common sense. Also, apparently it's a license to serve a tiny bowl of plain macaroni w a tiny amount of cheese thrown on top with no other ingredients or seasoning, call it a dish and charge 12+ dollars for it. Seriously, how is your Mac and cheese so bad? We buy the same (great) local cheese at the farmers market downtown, and you somehow have managed to make it completely tasteless. Bottom line, product did not taste like usual quality from these local purveyors. As long time residents of the Town of Vienna we thought this was a great addition to the town but after visiting we are not that...