Five 21

The atmosphere is very nice and very elegant as well. The service is good. The menu is very limited and the food was okay and definitely overpriced. The drinks are good and reasonably priced. That’s a nice romantic elegant get away in Lawrence, But definitely the menu and the food can use a lot of improvement

We scheduled dinner for eleven the evening before KU graduation exercises. The service was terrible and the food was okay. The servers were unskilled and inattentive. I thought they might have been bartenders, but the way they handled the wine service proved otherwise. We order two bottles of Gruet sparkling wine to toast our graduates. The server loudly popped the cork on the first bottle, thus proving he knew nothing about serving the wine. Then he poured a round without offering a tasting to the person who ordered the wine or to anyone else. The wine was warm, so I asked him to bring two ice buckets. He said the buckets were in use, despite the fact that the restaurant was not even half full and no buckets were within my eyesight. So I asked him to take both bottles back to the kitchen and ice them down. After what seemed to be a reasonable interval he brought them back and poured a sample. It was still warm. He said the bottle had been on ice, so I asked if he had put water in the ice and he had not. I told him how to cool the wine in a ice and water bath and eventually we had a couple of toasts with with almost cool sparkling wine. The food was a little better. Filets, chicken, and halibut were all prepared well, but the presentation was weak, plates without garnish or artful arrangement. Despite a request for bread and promise to bring some, none appeared during the meal. A noteworthy exception to the decent food was a the root beer something or other salt back. It was as bad as the name implies, despite our dining partner’s assumption that any dish with such unlikely ingredients must be the masterpiece of creative chef. The server did comp one of the two bottles of wine, but did not risk letting me decided how much gratuity he deserved by adding a large party enforced tip. It’s a shame that this beautiful venue in a beautiful hotel is not graced by food and service that one would expect and for which the price should demand.

My husband took me here for my birthday and I was expecting a quality experience similar to what I have experienced at Teller’s or Pachamamma’s. We were incredibly disappointed by the menu, food and service. We have a 15 month old and I am pregnant and it is rare that we go out with out the 15 month old. When I asked if I could get a «pretty» drink that does not have alcohol the waiter looked at me like I had 4 heads and asked me for an example. When looking at the menu all the choices seemed to be basic, not local and nothing spectacular. While waiting for our food all we heard from the kitchen was «server» and «runner». When I asked the server for the pasta special he did not know it-​there was only 1 special for the entire menu! I would NOT go back, I felt like I was reading a bar menu not a fine dining experience. The food was WAY overpriced for the quality and the experience. If you want a nice place to eat try one of the other restaurants in Lawrence.

Five-​21 was the best restaurant in Lawrence. I used to take friends, family, and clients there, and recommend it unreservedly to anyone looking for a restaurant in its price range (admittedly high). Sadly, this is no longer the case. They have recently changed the menu (2 weeks ago), for the worse. The staff is uninformed and unprofessional. The manager is clueless or apathetic or both, in any case incompetent. The food is weird, and very poorly prepared. While numerous waiters wandered about in a mostly deserted dining room, we waited for 45 minutes for food, and 20 minutes for drinks and the check. Silverware and the dessert menu never arrived. Other customers were complaining loudly about the service as well. It seems they tried to dumb down their menu, and everything else got dumbed down along with it. I won’t be going back, and I’ll be warning everyone I know away from the place. It’s really too bad. After a rocky start, this place had a brief period of brilliance. But that period has ended. In my opinion, it is now beyond repair or redemption. Don’t spend the money to learn his for yourself. (The one star is because they still have a liquor license.)

Great Food! I had my dinner paid for both times I’ve been here so I’m not familiar with the pricing (fortunately, I think), but both dinners I’ve had were fantastic! Great for group dinners or an intimate dining experience. P. S. I believe the name «Five 21» represents the owner’s anniversary. I always thought that was very cool.

Very formal, dark, quiet place. There are only a few menu items to choose from ranging from $ 24-​$ 32. Not sure if they have a professional chef or not, our server said he didn’t know.
I ordered the seafood mac and cheese. The pasta was dry and so was the lobster.
We didn’t see a manager, only two people walking around acting board, it was kind of a ghost town even though it’s pretty inside.
We all overheard two staff members complaining about their job and trying to get «cut» for the evening so they could go home to drink.

If this restaurant doesn’t improve upon just about everything, it’s going to be an abysmal failure. The hotel itself is lovely, and the restaurant space is nice, with a panoramic view of campus and the football stadium.
I could launch into a diatribe about all the problems with the restaurant (the forgettable, meaningless name, for example), but I’ll spare you the detail. The bottom line is they need a real chef and a house manager who gives a darn. The food is simplistic to the point of being blah, standard-​issue Sysco-​provided food made up to look fancy (and priced about 25% higher than it should be in Lawrence). The staff is clueless on just about everything, probably because they can’t keep consistent help, for the aforementioned reasons. When I have been there, it’s been so empty at dinnertime, you can’t even find anything resembling a server or hostess.
Eating at – what’s it called? oh yeah, 521 — is an exercise in frustration and wallet-​pumping. For dining at this price level, Pachamama’s and 715 beat this place to a pulp. I want The Oread to succeed, but they need to get the restaurant turned around 180 degrees if they actually want people to dine there.

Amateurish is an understatement. It was a comedy of errors. I was there four days after the restaurant opened, so surely it will improve. It is located in the impressive, new Oread Hotel next to the U. of Kansas Campus.
The restaurant has much promise, since its dining room is among the most attractive in Lawrence, the quality of the food ingredients is very good, the prices are reasonable, the wine list is very good and includes many reasonably priced choices, the background music is pleasant, and the servers are well meaning and try to be very helpful. But I’ve rarely seen so many things go wrong, even in a newly opened restaurant. From the time that I pulled up in my car until the time that I got into my car to leave, just about everything that could have gone wrong — did.
At present, they do not permit restaurant customers to self park in the hotel’s garage. Hopefully that will change. Now they have valet parking. I pulled up in front, and left my engine running with my key in the ignition. Someone walked over to me and gave me a claim check with my name on it. But he did not get into the car. Instead he left my car there awaiting someone else to park it. I was not about to leave my car, which was running and unoccupied, where anyone could have gotten into it and driven it off; so I walked into the hotel but continued watching my car through the front door window. After someone got into the car and seemed to be fumbling with the controls, I noticed that my hood had partially opened. I walked back over to him and asked if he was about to valet park my car. He said yes, but said he could not figure out how to release the parking brake (all he had to do was step on its pedal in the usual location), so he was pulling every control in sight, including the one that opened the hood. He then could not figure out how to close the hood, which was released but not fully open. I showed him how to do that and how to release the parking break. He then parked my car.
I had called to make reservations and had asked for a booth by the window. When we arrived at the restaurant, we looked for a maitre de or host or hostess. There were none at the restaurant. I walked over to a waitress and told her we had reservations. She said the desk was not at the restaurant, but at the lobby bar at the front of the hotel. She walked to the front desk to check on our reservation, came back, and tried to seat us at a small 2-​top non-​booth table far from the windows. I refused the table and informed her that we had reserved a booth by a window. She walked off again to go back to the desk by the lobby bar at the front of the hotel, finally returned, and seated us at a booth.
I was given a wine list, and ordered a wine from Italy. I not only told the waitperson the name of the wine but pointed to it on the wine list and provided the bin number from the wine list. After a long wait, a different waiter arrived with a different wine from France (a higher priced wine — of course). He seemed surprised, when I refused it. Another waiter then arrived with the correct wine. This waiter seemed to be a significant cut above the others. But his wine etiquette was wrong. After letting me taste the wine I ordered, he was supposed to pour the first glass for the woman at the table. Instead he poured the first glass for me. In addition, he did not give me the cork to check until after I had accepted the wine, and he had already poured glasses for both of us.
If you don’t like bacon, or have religious or ethical reasons to avoid bacon, stay far way from this restaurant. Without telling you, they seem to put bacon in almost everything, and the menu does not inform you. I stated very clearly when I first ordered that I did not want bacon on anything. When the salad came out, there was bacon in it, although the menu did not mention it. The sweet potatoes contain bacon, although that is not mentioned on the menu. The scallops have a crust of bacon on them. When I returned the scallops, they explained that they cannot serve the scallops without the pre-​seared bacon coating. Despite the fact that we stated from the start that we would not eat bacon, and kept refusing dishes that contain bacon, they kept bringing out one course after another with bacon.
When we left the restaurant, we provided the claim check to the valet parking manager. My car was brought out reasonably soon. But the passenger door, which was open when we left the car, was locked.
I would like to be able to bring university guests to this restaurant, which is practically on campus. But a high percentage of our speakers and university guests are from other countries and are accustomed to sophisticated service. In a few months, I’ll give this restaurant another try. Hopefully they’ll have their act together by then.