LITA — Restaurant in Walnut Creek

My wife and I finally made it to Lita. I found out about Lita a long time ago and was excited to go there after learning about the chef and the food. We started out with the beef empanadas. The filling was a little spicy which I like but it was just a tad salty. People should realize when you use spice you can use less salt. That being said, the empanada dough was FABULOUS! FANTASTIC. BEAUTIFUL! t was very light and crisp and not oily or greasy at all. The best I've ever had. So much for the good news about the food. Admittedly, our sampling of the menu was small, but the other items paled in comparison to the execution of the empanadas. The Mexican Street Corn was next. It came out at room temperature and had way too much coating on it. They provided a steak knife for you to shave the kernels off the cobb which I didn't understand. First of all, it's street food and it's meant to eat with your hands and the kernels are more difficult to cut off the cobb after it's cooked and the type of knife is wrong to do the job. You would need a sharp, straight edge knife to do the job easily and not a serrated knife that would tear and rip the corn. Of course, they shouldn't provide the public with a sharp, straight edge knife for safety reasons but if you mean for the kernels to be cut off the cobb, it should have been done in the kitchen or have a server do it table side. The Crispy Brussels sprouts were good. I would have preferred to have some currants or a few raisins to cut the bitterness and sourness of the dressing but the sweetness from the corn helped. Now, for the biggest disaster of them all, the Lobster Corn Dog. I can't remember a dish being such a collosal failure before. It has a tremendously thick batter covering MAYBE 2 or 3 ounces of lobster plus it was hammered so much half the lobster overcooked and the rest had turned into lobster jerky. Even more criminal is they charge $37.00 for this monstrosity. They should immediately remove this dish from the menu, apologize for having it on the menu and contact all patrons that ordered it and offer a refund and promise not to ever put it in the menu, ever. Even one of the servers said they refuse to recommend that dish. Horrible, just horrible. I don't mind paying for a dish but it really makes me angry for a restaurant to charge an exorbitant price for something so poorly executed. The execution of a dish is what you pay for and that execution was so bad it SHOULD NOT have left the kitchen. There should be someone watching the dishes coming out of the kitchen and it seems someone didn't do their job. Finally, we had A Taste of Key Lime pie. Basically, a deconstructed Key Lime pie. My wife loves Key Lime pie and we thought this would be a safe choice. It had piped meringue that had been lightly torched alternating with Key Lime curd (which we weren't sure it was made with Key Lime juice, maybe Persian lime juice), a Graham Cracker crumble and Coconut Gelato. The meringue was ok but the exterior didn't caramelize enough to create the chewy, sticky exterior one would expect. I suspect it was due to not enough sugar. The crumble was essentially Graham Cracker dust and not a crumble and the "Gelato" had the taste of artificial coconut flavoring or liqueur that wasn't very good and it was more like an icy ice cream than anything resembling a gelato. This is nothing like a gelato at all. We went to Italy last fall and had gelato there and this is another case of restauranteurs mislabeling dishes and misleading the public. If it sounds fancy enough, you can charge more. We had a couple of servers approach us after we were seated. Both were very nice, attentive and professional. I expressed some of my disappointment and he could see we barely touched the desert and said the feedback is important and he would relay the information to the chef plus he did remove it from the check. He didn't have all of the information stated here but I sincerely hope he reads this or someone show him this. We had a $100.00 lunch and left feeling very much unsatisfied. So...

I am often in the Walnut Creek area for work/business, so I have been around the food places here. I was in town for business and was fortunate enough to be able to have my wife on this trip, so I opted to find some place that had good drinks, good food, and good atmoshpere. I had only brought 1 set of "fancy" clothes for a meeting in the morning, and had expensive but casual clothes otherwise (I.e. True Religion, Supreme, Nike, etc.). I had searched to see what was in the area and Lita stood out because it actually hit the 3 categories I was looking for perfectly, or so I'd thought. It also had no dress-code, so this seemed like the best option. So,I made a reservation for 8:30pm that night and for the date I donned my dark TR denim, long-sleeve Supreme thermal sweater, and a pair of some nice Jordan sneakers whereas my wife wore a nice skirt, flats, and a nice top. Upon arriving to Lita I was greeted by the hostess, and while I had seen many open tables AND had a reservation that the hostess confirmed, we had to wait about 10mins to be seated which I thought to be odd since we had arrived a few minutes early for our reservation. This is where things go from odd to just unacceptable. There were a good amount of people in the restaurant after we had been seated and it sort of sdeems as though the people standing around the bar felt the need to crowd near our table. We had asked our server to see if they could get the crowd to move away from us, as my wife is hard of hearing and I was needing to try very hard to have her hear me. My server said that she wouldn't disturb them and that we were welcomed to leave if we weren't comfortable with the atmosphere. What? We are paying customers. What kind of response is that? We had ordered an appetizer and after about half an hour of waiting for our server to return, dealing with the noise, and waiting for 2 glasses of water, 2 cocktails, and the appetizer we wife and I decided to leave. It was like since we had mentioned that we weren't happy with the group of people disturbing us, that WE were the problem. Upon leaving I had asked the hostess where our server was and she told us that "she was probably on break" but assured us that we would be taken care of, to which I replied "We will be taken care of somewhere else, I'm not going to give you guys the chance to mistreat us anymore." I'm never coming here again, and am going to use whatever influence I have on social media to deter people from dining here unless they are 20-25yr old colleagues from some sort of mid-level lawfirm, since those seem to be the kind of guests the choose to service like...

Lita is a beautiful restaurant, I love the interior design and vibe. The Brussel sprouts, pork taco and pepper shrimp bowl were the highlights of our meal. And the coconut creme filled doughnuts were absolutely delicious. The lobster corn dog was ok, definitely needed more seasoning or a better sauce, was lacking flavor and the kick you would expect from a Carribean restaurant. The one thing I was super disappointed about was the ceviche!!! We ordered the ceviche trio and the waitress brought us just one of the types of the three ceviches. So I told her and expected her to fix her mistake, instead, to my surprise she charged us for BOTH!!! Both of which were like $28 dollars each, so we spent $56 on something that was not even close to ceviche. I specifically told the waitress before ordering that I am pregnant and asked her if the ceviche was "cooked" long enough in the lime to be consumed by a pregnant woman (who cannot eat raw fish), she said yes! The ceviche came and was cut in MUCH thicker than a traditional ceviche and was translucent, making it painfully obvious that it was still VERY raw fish (as you can plainly see in the pics). It was sashimi not ceviche by any means. It was also incredibly bland, lacking the citrus forward flavor that all traditional ceviches have or any seasoning for that matter. My friend said we shouldn't complain, so I didn't want to embarrass her, but when I got home and thought about paying $56 dollars for a waitresses, terrible tasting mistake that could have killed my baby and I felt instant regret. Our bill was $186 before tip (we still tipped her 20%) for two people for lunch. We ordered a lot of stuff because we wanted to try different dishes and support this new restaurant but it should have been $130 for sure. I literally brought the ceviche home, offered it to my sashimi loving husband and when he turned his nose up to it, gave it to my DOGS!! The shocking part was was we ordered beef empenadas and they served us chicken, the waitress happily exchanged that for us with no charge but insisted we didn't order the trio? I was super cool about it because it's their first week and I know they're still working out the kinks, but taking it off our bill was the least she could have done to make up for THREE huge mistakes. I'm a huge fan of Carribean food and was really excited about this place. I'd love to come back but that waitress left a really bad taste in my mouth--now...