September 17, 2012: Hemingway Restaurant and Bar.

Hemingway Restaurant and Bar.
500 Cypress Creek Road #170 (Cedar Park, 78613)
(512) 219-6400
30.495745°N, 97.82236°W
WiFi: No.
Pepper grinder rating: 0.
Men’s room rating: 2.5.

Dwight’s comments:

I wanted to like this place. And there’s a lot to like about it. The mostly wood decor is pleasant to look at, and makes the restaurant feel older than it actually is. I liked our waitress enough that I should have asked for her phone number. Our appetizers (especially the mussels and crab cakes) were very good. And the staff (including, but not limited to, our cute waitress) were very attentive.
Unfortunately, there were some early indications of problems. One of our party ordered soup, instead of salad, with his meal. No problem, right? You’d figure they’d bring it with the salad, right? Nope. When he asked about it, they gave him a kind of odd excuse (“We make the soup to order, so it takes a little longer.”) and then brought it out…with the meal…and brought him a bowl instead of the cup he asked for.
They did only charge him for the cup, but that wasn’t the only ordering screw-up. One of that other diner’s sides wound up on my plate. I ordered a baked potato, fully loaded with butter, sour cream, etc. and got one with just butter. I asked for sour cream and never got it.
And I ordered the “Beeves Galveston”, described as “Seared tenderloin topped with our own crawfish & shrimp whiskey pecan butter sauce”. When I think “tenderloin”, I think something that looks more like this. What I got was a rather undifferentiated mass of beef, with several medium-sized chunks of gristle in it. The sauce was okay, but I really felt let down by the dish.
I’d be willing to give them another shot, but if I did, I’d order a burger and see if it came out of the kitchen the way I wanted it. You fail that test, to restaurant purgatory you go.

Lawrence’s comments:

I liked my chicken fried steak a good bit better than Dwight liked his entree, and I thought the crab cake was a heck of a deal during the half-price appetizer window. The also kept my Diet Coke well refilled without asking.

My problem with the place is that it’s a bit more of a sports bar than I usually look for in a place to have dinner. And if I wanted a sports bar, there are nearer places than Cedar Park.

(Notice how manfully Dwight and I have  refrained from cheap Ernest Hemingway puns and jokes…)