Epicurious Social Club

My family came to Epicurious Social Club for my birthday dinner, excited to support a new local(ish) establishment. We eat in Borrego often and like to support the restaurants there and we were looking forward to checking out this new spot, in spite of mixed reviews on social media groups. We are always willing to give a place a fair shot and make our own decisions about our experience.

Firstly, I want to say we understand this is a new restaurant. So I do give a lot more grace than I would with an established eatery.

For the service, it was very lacking. The waitress, while friendly, wasn’t incredibly professional and didn’t know what the beer and soda menu had to offer, so 2 of our drinks had to be substituted for other things. Not a huge deal, but i feel knowing the menu is important. it took forever to receive water, which was never refilled during our meal. It took too long for our table to be approached to order, we sat for quite a while with no water and no one coming to take our order. It wasn’t busy while we were there. A server did come by and try to deliver the wrong food, jokingly we thought maybe we should just take it because we were hungry…of course we would never do that but we got a laugh.

The spaghetti and penne Meat Lovers Treat was delicious. The noodles were cooked well and the sauce was great. My husband ordered spaghetti, he’s a big spaghetti guy and my friend ordered penne. They give these a 4 out of 5.

I had the lasagne. It was good, but it the temperature varied from barely warm enough to hot. I would prefer the entire meal to be hot. It was also pretty messy on the plate in my opinion, so getting a cohesive bite was hard. I like a well rounded bite when it comes to lasagne so this wasn’t the experience I was hoping for. 3 out of 5 stars.

My daughter got the Mediterranean pizza. It looked great but it was incredibly soggy in the middle, when you held a piece up it was terribly limp and the crust looked visibly wet. It was cool when we received it so we know it had been sitting a while. We brought it home and she will eat it recooked in the air fryer. Not a total loss, but a shame it came fresh that way or it would have been excellent. 2 out of 5 stars.

The focaccia was underwhelming. 2/5 stars. It’s an appetizer but it came at the same time as the food, because it took so long for someone to come take our order so we ordered everything at the same time since it was uncertain when someone would return at this point.

We were never checked on until it was time to end the meal. We were never offered a dessert menu, maybe there isn’t one, but that would be surprising to me considering the rest of the menu. We were just offered the check.

I asked if the owner was present because I would have liked to offer this feedback in person, kindly, because we want to see new businesses succeed. We were told he’d come to the table, he never did. We ended up leaving.

Maybe we will wait a few months for things to settle and return, but maybe not. It’s hard to spend money dining out a second time somewhere you’ve had a less than desirable experience.

Finally, I would have skipped this review altogether had the owner come to the table like we requested. But we weren’t given the opportunity to try to offer this feedback in the way we wanted so here we are.

I hope things level out for this restaurant. I’d love to be surprised sometime in the future if we return.