Carving Room NoMa — Restaurant in Washington

Highly disappointed by this one.

I live in the neighborhood, and saw that this place had opened up while I was walking by one night. The place looked fantastic, with a great ambiance, a very nice looking bar, and plenty of patrons. So my fiance and I decided to try it for lunch one day. We soon regretted our decision.

Upon arrival, there was a line out the door. We feared that we had shown up too late, and had been beaten by the midday lunch rush. As we got closer, we saw that the line was due to a logjam at the main podium, as soon as you walk in the door. Nearly all of the tables were still open.

Now normally, I assume a place with this sort of setup will have you take a seat, and then place your order with a waiter/server. Here, this was not the case, hence the long line out the door into the heat. You place your order and pay at the front podium, and then get a table number along with your receipt, which the servers then have to run around searching for the right number. It's a highly inefficient process, only helped today by the fact that there were not too many patrons there all at once.

Ordering at the podium was a chore. The hostess, or more seemingly the system was inefficient. We ordered an entree for each of us, and it took nearly a whole two minutes of the hostess tapping away at the touchscreen just to get the first item entered in.

My fiance ordered a chicken schnitzel sandwich, and I went with the CR Burger, thinking it would be difficult to mess those up. Upon ordering, I came to the shocking realization that the listing prices on the menu ($13 for both entrees) did not include ANY sides. Fries were extra, and thus I did not order any.

We proceeded to our seats, and waited for our food to arrive. In the meantime, we had water at the table to keep us occupied. I did go up to the bar and ask the bartender for a refill of water and some lemon. It was no trouble at all, but he carried himself as if I had just asked a tremendous burden of him. Not a great impression of service.

Service was generally lacking the entire visit. No one checked up on us for refills of water, no one asked us how our food was, and no one came to clear anything from the table. Just generally felt incredibly isolated, and a very cold experience. I've had far superior customer service interactions at my worst visits to a place like Nando's, which follows a similar dining model.

As to how the food was, the burger was thoroughly okay. It was cooked a good medium, had decent flavor, and the special mayo was a nice touch. However, the patty itself was incredibly underwhelming in terms of size, especially considering the price for it. I would have been better served with a burger from Five Guys, and paid far less, or equal with a side of fries.

As for the chicken schnitzel, it was disgusting. The chicken was of obviously very poor quality. Very tough and difficult to chew. Seasoning was okay, but overall just inedible. My fiance ended up eating the sandwich without the chicken on it. We both tried a small bite of the chicken, and I know the servers were looking at us as we did, and we made disgusted faces, but did anyone come over to ask us how we were? Nope! They all stood in the back in a circle on their phones.

We will not be back here. Not only was the food disappointingly mediocre at best, but it was incredibly overpriced, and the staff clearly do not care about the quality of the product, or their patrons, and that's a damn shame. A place like this, but of true quality, is a place that this neighborhood could really use, which makes this just more...

The good things about our experience: The crispy Dutch potato appetizer was very good and the Shawarma was delicious. The drinks were also very good. I got the passion fruit mule and my partner got a pumpkin beer.

Now the downside to our experience: My partner ordered lamb chomps as his main dish. ($40) He asked for them to be medium rare. They came out and the first thing we noticed was the presentation could have been a little better. Super nit picky but also matters to some. Next, all the lamb lollipops were different sizes. One was large, another was medium and the last one was very small. They were also all cooked to very different temperatures. The large one was literally raw and the smaller one was practically medium well. When we asked a waitstaff about the issue she directed us to the manager. Once the manager comes over he offers us half off the price after admitting that the food before him was undercooked. This wasn’t a satisfactory solution because while half of the lamb was edible it still was not cooked to the desired temperature. When we asked if the entire entree could be comped because the entire entree was cooked incorrectly the manager reluctantly agreed. While we do appreciate and recognize he agreed with our solution, his initial reluctance was not the customer service experience we expect when we go to a nicer restaurant. To make matters worse, the manager did not even apologize that we were served raw meat.

The next issue we had was the general customer service. I understand that our waitress was young so there is likely a level of experience she doesn’t have yet; however, she rarely came to our table. We ordered our appetizer and she didn’t come back to our table to ask what we wanted for our entree until our app had come out and we had finished eating it (approx. 30 mins). She also did not come back to ask how the meal was. When we brought up our issue with the lamb chops that was with a different staff member. The restaurant only had 3 total tables seated and only 2 were our waitresses.

Overall, I don’t think we would go back to...

I was in a bit of a quandry. It was the last day of hosting a big group of relatives and we all wanted to go to a restaurant. I had teenagers, adults, vegetarians and meat enthusiasts. Then I remembered that Carving Room NOMA (I had been to the original Carving Room many times) had just opened.

It's such a pleasure to know that everyone can find something on the menu and to see smiles on everyone's faces (we have a very picky group). The vegetarians were enchanted by the earthy beet puree (with fresh bread!!) and the impossibly light and smooth ricotta cheese with a touch of honey. We also had a tender and flavorful carrot salad. They finished off with a beautiful fresh tomato flatbread.

The meat eaters had a ribeye flat bread with a Harissa drizzle (mmmm...), and a burger that was absolutely insane. It was impressive with a fluffy fresh baked bun, onion jam and came with crispy hot cumin fries. We also had an order of crispy spiced meat cigars (think exotic egg rolls) which I remember from the original restaurant. I'm so glad they serve them here!

The service was friendy and attentive without being intrusive. I liked that food came out as it was ready. We were all able to talk and share bites.

The owners (Oded and Rachel) even came by to check on our food and and were really kind! They took the time out to give some cooking advice to one of our teenagers that had questions. They chatted about making all the homemade sauces and were just natural hosts.

We all left pleasantly full and satisfied. I'll be coming back to try their cocktails! It looks like a great place for a date. The bar looks...