Paladin Downtown — Restaurant in Winchester

My daughter and I went here this evening for dinner. With our schedules we don’t get to go out often so it was a treat to be able to have dinner out with her. We had planned on going to The Oyster Bar in Middleburg but wasn’t going to make it there by our reservation time so we chose to go someplace we had not been before…Paladin downtown Winchester. I’m a quality over quantity kind of person but this place was neither one. I ordered the $26 crab cake dinner. The meatball sized crab cakes were served on top of a lot of tartar sauce YUCK! If your crab cakes are good you don’t need tartar sauce which should come as a side. The hot crab cakes melted into the tartar sauce so even though I immediately wiped them off that’s all I could taste. The broccoli and cheese didn’t look appealing at all but I took a bite and it tasted as bad as it looked. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the stuff you boil in a bag. The roasted potatoes were ok. My daughter ordered the vegetable ravioli. She let me try it thinking maybe we could switch meals but the undercooked ravioli was covered in the worst sauce I’ve ever tasted. It looked and tasted like thick tomato paste dumped out of a can. No vegetables to be found inside or outside of the pasta. The bread was good though. The bill was $100 (5 hours of work for me). She did get a couple of drinks which were fine, waitress provided excellent service and was tipped well, nice atmosphere but food was very disappointing. I’m curious if this place has a chef or a couple of high school kids doing the cooking. The later would be my guess. I came home and ate left over pizza from last night. Won’t be wasting time or hard earned money at this...

We stopped in upstairs for drinks and apps while waiting for a table at a nearby restaurant. A large table had a reserved sign on it but upon seeing the 7 of us, the bartender came over, removed it, and said the party never showed up and it had been over 30 minutes so it was all ours. We ordered and shortly after that the manager, Amy, approached our table and told us she was sorry but we had to move. It was already tight up there with nowhere else to really go especially since we were now waiting on food but not wanting to be argumentative, our group of 7 hovered around 2 open barstools at the bar. I don't generally ever ask for a comp but I did for the first 2 drinks we ordered which was promptly refused with the excuse that it was not within her power to do so. It would have been a small give to keep the customers happy for the major inconvenience. Instead it will definitely not be somewhere I'd choose to be again. Btw, the website clearly states that they do not take reservations, first come...

Cool looking place. It was a beautiful evening so we were trying to decide between eating in the restaurant or at the upstairs roof top. We asked the hostess if the the food in the restaurant was the same upstairs, and we got a resounding yes!. However she should have mentioned that if you eat upstairs, the food is delivered to the table in a paper bag, with plastic containers, utensils and no plates. We would have stayed downstairs if we knew that. I also asked if the taco salad with chicken was grilled chicken pieces, again yes, but it was not; it was a small amount of shredded chicken with a lot of chopped lettuce. My wife had the beet sandwich which she liked. Neither the bar tender or hostess seemed to be particularly interested in figuring out a solution to improve the dining experience so we left the food on the table, paid up and walked around the corner to another restaurant which had better...