This place was highly recommended by a family member who in retrospect, I was reminded, has zero sense of good taste and hates most seasonings. Let me paint a picture: We were sat this evening after a mysterious amount of run around the last two days, in which we were denied a reservation the day before which built up a level of interest and excitement in how good this place must be, we looked eagerly to our feast. The first bad sign was being ignored for 20 minutes, till finally a server noticed that we hadn't even been offered a drink yet. This borough to mind the urging by staff over the last two days to come early and enjoy a drink ahead of time, which we can only assume now is so that you will be buzzed enough to not notice how mid the food really is.
After getting our drinks and being served Mrs. Shuster's frozen aisle rolls we got our first of two "good" dishes of the evening; the "cheese soup" and then our sparse salads, which were the best part of the night. We ordered the Prime Rib (medium rare) and the Lemon Herbed Chicken. Both of which took a while to come out which was perfectly reasonable for something being cooked to order. These were served then the table side dishes arrived. The Prime Rib was a fine sized cut to be fair but lacked any actual flavor, it was served sitting in a shallow pool of Au Ju, the chicken dish was dry and served over a bed of rice which was actually ok and probably had the most seasonings of any dish this evening. The side dishes were awful, not only were the green beans undercooked, they still had stems on them and some had to be plucked apart to even try them, worst of all were the bland, hard slivered almonds simply thrown on top of them hard as could be. The "mushroom" dish I'll be honest we didn't even try and you probably wouldn't either it looked absolutely unappealing and mushy. Then the carrots, these were undercooked and still hard, and seemed to have been placed in a bowl with pancake syrup drizzled over the top, no flavor and no seasoning and still hard.
We are not ones to ever complain and when our server checked up on us 20+ minutes after bringing us the food we mentioned a few of the aforementioned problems with the dishes including the flavorless prime rib to which she admitted the issues with the side dishes and offered to bring me a side of horseradish sauce for my beef. This admittedly made the prime rib palatable and I was able to finish it, the chicken being dry as could be my wife couldn't eat but a quarter of it and then when our bill came nothing was discounted not even when we refused dessert.
All in all, we don't see the appeal of the dining room here and we were seriously considering coming to stay here as it is a very unique place full of interesting history and the staff do seem to be competent and kind. We left a generous tip (30% of the bill) so as to not offend our server who was pretty good overall and as it wasn't her fault in the least as far as the quality of the food went we didn't want to take it out on her. Seeing as we didn't get a break on the cost of this disappointing meal, I didn't hesitate to leave this review while still sitting on the front porch overlooking a gorgeous view of the Smokey Mountains. So in retrospect, come for the view and history of this place but not for the food, you will be very disappointed otherwise. read more