The River Rock

We LOVE Skamania Lodge. Truly. I would wake up here every day if I could. The River Rock seems like the red-headed step child of this operation. The dishes are hit-or-miss. Burger? Hit. Crab cake sandwich? Hit. Truffle fries? Boom! BBQ Chicken Pizza? Sad, sorry, mess. The crust was suspiciously frozen tasting AND looking. The bbq sauce must have come from a bottle labeled "World's Weakest BBQ Sauce". It arrived in varying shades of brown and tan, no color whatsoever. Sprinkle some parsley or green onion on that thing!  Remember, the EYES eat first. Horrible. Horrible. If you are considering the pizza, RE-consider.

My husband and I came into the River Rock around 3:30pm today for a late lunch. We waited by the entrance for someone to seat us. We ended up seating ourselves. We ordered the BBQ chicken pizza and a kids chicken strip meal. When our order arrived the pizza was just a plain cheese pizza with a few pieces of chicken in a really bland honey dijon sauce. We were confused as we ordered a BBQ chicken pizza not a honey dijon chicken pizza. The chicken strip kid meal was great, my son really like the fries and the chicken was not greasy. Also, good portion for a kid meal. After our server brought our pizza he didn't come back for about 30 minutes. I noticed our server was spending quite a bit of time chatting with other co-workers behind the bar. He could see our table from the bar so I guess he assumed he didn't need to check on us. There was a table or two that needed to be cleared and a wet rag lying on another table. When we mentioned to our server that the pizza was not bbq but rather a dijon sauce, he sad it was a Carolina Gold BBQ sauce? Hmmm..I've never hear of it ...but ok. He did take the $16 dollar charge for the pizza off our tab which I thought was nice so I'm adding another star. However, once again he never came back after dropping off the bill. This time I noticed he was once again talking to a co-worker near the bar. My husband stood up and we started to walk toward the bar to pay our tab and then our server magically appeared. This is the second time in the past month we have eaten here and both time the food has been disappointing. It's too bad as we love Skamania Lodge. The next time we stay we'll leave to have lunch or dinner elsewhere. Hopefully the lodge will  hire more professional staff in the future that care more about customer service and cleanliness than chatting with co-workers in the bar.

I didn't listen to the reviewers and ate here.  Our family had the cheese pizza, kids chicken and fries meal, and a salad.  

The salad seemed like the fancy mixed greens from Costco with some red onions and tomatoes on it.  Not very impressive.  

The kids meal had nice sized chicken breasts on it and fries with a crust.  The cheese pizza tasted like a frozen pizza.  It looked beautiful until we ate it.  The crust was soft and the sauce was sweet.  Its good if you want to relive memories of crappy pizza.  To be fair, our 3 year old ate the pizza over 2 days, so it  suits a little kid's starving tastebuds.

Avoid this place and head into town to eat instead.