Saturday night after the Reds game we picked this place as it ranked highly on open table for outdoor seating. Unfortunately you can only make reservations for "inside" seating and the patio at the restaurant is "first come first serve." (shame on open table that they only disclose that to you after you make the reservation on there, fyi).
We made an 8:15 reservation just in case the outside seating was going to be a long wait because we knew we'd be hungry. We arrived at 8:10. Greeted nicely and quickly, and the host did tell us that if we wanted to wait for outside it would be 20-25 minutes, so we decided that would be okay.
Bad estimate as the host finally came and got us 50 minutes later. I understand that it's probably difficult to determine exact times, but if we would have known it was going to be that long we would have just gone ahead and eaten inside.
Since we were so hungry we decided to go for an appetizer and chose the "Prawn Lettuce Wraps" for $16. Taste wise - great. Portion wise - terrible. Only 3 "prawns" and those were the size of normal cooked shrimp at the grocery store. There were 4 lettuce wraps, some sauce and greens, and also some great tasting pork bits that came too. But really for $16 I found 3 shrimp to be kind of sad. A quick survey of my dining club friends to "guess" how many they should get for $16 the minimum guess was 8 and ranged up to 12.
Before the meal we were also served a generous portion of nicely crusted bread with tasty whipped butter.
On to the entrees - for $27 I got the sockeye salmon special. A decent piece of salmon and it was cooked very well. It had a simple glaze and a fava bean puree. It also came with a generous portion of grilled asparagus served over fried noodles. I found the noodles to be burnt, but the wife kind of liked the charred taste. The asparagus was very good.
Wife had the fish tacos and pronounced them tasty especially with the chipotle lime and avocado.
We sampled a couple of wines and found the Italian Barbera was a decent choice at $31/bottle, good to ask for a decanting on that as it opened it up nicely. The rest of the red wine list seemed a little proud, for example they carry Simi Cabernet, which at $55 is probably $10-$15 more than I would expect to pay for a bottle that wholesales for about $10-$12.
Entree delivery time was a little slow, we were just about to the point of wondering when it finally came out. It wasn't ridiculously long, just saying we were at the point where we were hoping it was coming soon.
Want to add that the staff of the Quarter Bistro was very attentive and friendly. Our server was warm and friendly, spent time with us and made recommendations. Other servers checked on us (and others) and looked like a good team effort there.
The outside patio area is very nice with comfortable seats, not cheap plastic stuff like some places have.
Sometimes it's hard to say "average vs. very good" here as a rating, I think this falls between the two. Would we go back? Yes we would. Will we look at trying some other places first next time we are in town? Probably so.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC.
