McMenamins North Bank

I have such fond memories of McMenamins North Bank, but my recent experiences haven't lived up to those memories from six or seven years ago. The service is adequate, but it almost seems deliberately just adequate. There's absolutely no effort made to go above and beyond. The food has lost half a step, or perhaps I just remember it being better than it really is. I love its location right on the river, and since it's close to Autzen I'll probably continue to stop in from time to time. But for all that it's perfectly fine, it just doesn't impress.

First time here.  This is a pretty typical McMenamins.  Nicely done facility.  Decent, albeit pricey food.   Craft beer that isn't really offensive, but also not really worth going out of your way to find IMO.  This place is pretty close to the hotel I'm staying at, and the cheese plate was pretty tasty.  I would certainly come here again for the same thing if I was in the mood for a lighter snack.

Nice lazy sunny day, figured we would get a beer and lunch. We were told there would be a 15 minute wait to sit outside. No Problem, I can sit at the bar and get started on my beer. It was almost 30 minutes later when we finally were able to get a seat, we were about to give up, because we had seen people helping themselves to seating outside.

Since we had plenty of time to look at the menu's we already knew what we wanted, but out waitress wouldn't take our order. 10 minutes later we finally get to order - fry's and tots (yummmm) with soup, and a salad to start, and the caesar salmon salad, and a regular bacon cheese burger. Then more waiting!
Also - note, that there is a smoking section outside - yuck.

We couldn't believe that a soup and salad were taking so long (almost 45 minutes..) so we ask about if the frys, tots, soup and salad were coming. Our waitress said that she had just been paged, and it should be our food.

Low and behold out came everything! Last time I checked app's were supposed to come out before the main dish. The burger was meh - there was no seasoning at all. Backyard burgers cooked at home at least have some flavor. There was none. The bacon was like jerky. You could chew it for days and days. The frys and tots were barely warm, and dry, like they had been sitting out for I don't know, say the last 40 minutes. I ate the salmon off the salad, but the rest of it was so plain, that I couldn't taste anything but the lettuce, no caesar dressing at all! The only perk to the whole meal was the soup. It was a tomato coconut curry. It was amazing.

Back to waiting - Finished what we could, and then waited for our waitress to even walk by to get our ticket. After sitting and waiting, we finally got more fed up, and went inside where they had lost our ticket. I was ready to walk out, but after running about, and some more waiting, they were able to 'find' our ticket, and we were able to pay and get out.

Next time we will go to the High Street one instead.