Risto's Place

Fancy restauraunt without the upcharge!  Delicious food, made only with the best ingredients - the owner is real picky with where she gets things.  Lots of local ingredients.  But the prices are so reasonable!  Everything on the lunch menu is basically under $10.  And the desserts...mmmmm fresh made every day.  Get the vanilla bean cheesecake.

ATTENTION!!!!!!!!!!

Don't waste your money. Which is exactly what you will be doing if you eat at this so called "fine dining" experiment.
  My husband and I were excited to try this little place out after we had seen a special about it on tv.  We thought "hey if its on tv then it must be good!" but sadly that was not the case.
 First off the cozy little restaurant is in a downtown historic building with hight tin ceilings. Quite lovely, if it weren't for the decor. Tacky comes to mind when the front of the building is covered in...Balloons? The place looks like you are going to a children's birthday rather than a fine dining restaurant. Inside carried out the tacky theme with a menagerie of wonderful details like Local art on the walls (not to mention the walls themselves, I'd love to know their painter) covered in sports memorabilia. Thats right! Steelers stuff haphazardly thrown everywhere. Because nothing says fine dining like football.
  Though I can say that there was one thing this place had in common with a high class eatery, the High prices. The place boasts ridiculous prices for sub-par cuisine. I had Sage and prosciutto wrapped shrimp which sounded delicious on paper but was in fact 21 bucks worth of watery bland angel hair topped with 4 dry rubbery shrimp.  My husband had the fish special that evening and It was the highlight of the night It was so good (I regret not ordering that). But one good dish doesn't make a restaurant now does it?
   I will say however that the waitstaff are amazing, You will never have an empty glass thats for sure! They may be the only saving grace for the place (if it could be saved)
   After dinner we moved to the lounge for drinks and live music however the final offense in a long list of offenses was our bar bill at the end of the evening was outrageous! two glasses of wine (which listed on the menu were priced at 6 bucks apiece) were charged as 9 on the ticket not to mention an extra two drinks we never had. WATCH YOUR TICKETS!!! When we politely asked for the mistake to be corrected we had the pleasure of meeting the owner of this lackluster attempt of a restaurant in which rather than fix the issue, disputed with us that we did indeed have all the drinks listed.

All in all, Risto's Place was so bad that I had to write a book about it.
Save yourself some time and a TON of money just skip this overrated, sad attempt at a fine dinning experience.

We don't eat out much but my DH wanted to try this place out.  We went long ago when it was still Mayo's.  
The waitress was wonderful though not terribly attentive. We ordered a bottle of wine and it didn't come until we asked two more times.  
She talked me into the filet it was just okay.  My husband got the bolognese and thought it was quite good.  I'm not a veal fan so I didn't try it.  We passed on dessert so cannot speak to that.
After dinner, we went into the lounge and enjoyed the rest of the evening with the King Bees, a small ensemble from Todd, NC - very bluesy-rockish.  We thoroughly enjoyed it.
Now we'll be watching for what musical entertainment they have there.