Capital Bleu

This place is just completely ridiculous! The menu prices are astronomical for the quality of food you get. I just can’t say this more straight forward– this place is certainly NOT worth your money. And the service is TERRIBLE! If this tells you how much we hated eating here– I’m taking the time to write this review and we ate there basically free! I had to live at this Hilton for 5 months while my husband was at Walter Reed after a severe incident in Afghanistan. Anyway, the Army gave us voucher’s to eat here for up to $ 25 each per day– and we could never get this to cover the full cost of our meals. Anyway, that’s not the point– every time we ate here we left saying how outraged we would have been if we’d have had paid the full amount on our bill! I feel so strongly about this that I want to warn any other travelers that may potentially be staying here NOT to waste their time or money on this place! This restaurant is just a joke. We hated it so much and found the whole experience to be so exhausting that even having the opportunity to eat here for basically free, we choose not to (I think we ended up eating here maybe a total of 5 – 10 times over the period of those 5 months because it just simply wasn’t worth it!). **Okay, in fairness, the buffet breakfast is just fine; it comes complete with your standard breakfast foods and the fact that you serve yourself seems to help it move along at a normal pace. I also think it’s better because the restaurant is pretty busy for breakfast so perhaps they’re trying harder ect. I think you would feel good about paying for the breakfast. Either way, all I can say is NEVER waist your time or money eating here for dinner! It may only be your party and one other small party in the whole place and you’ll still never getting in and out in less than two hours (and most of the time when you’re eating at your hotel, it isn’t because you want a painfully long dinner excursion! It’s because you want to be lazy, ride the elevator down, eat and get back up to your room!). The other sad fact about this place is that it isn’t handicap ready. A friend of ours came over from Walter Reed to eat with us one time (he is an amputee) — using his crutches to get around at this point, he ended up tripping and falling up the stairs! It was just terrible. Shame on Hilton for this restaurant.

Re-​visited Capital Bleu after 6 months and have to downgrade a star due to service. There is one waitress and one hostess for the restaurant and this caused us to wait a bit overlong trying to flag the waitress for our bill.
In addition, although the gift certificates make the price of an outing more reasonable, the price for a meal for 2 is still a little out of range for most casual dining occasions.
Large portions are the norm.

Fiancée asked for the wine list, but after she had a chance to look it over, asked if they had any beer on tap instead. Which they didn’t. She leaned over to me and whispered, «It smells in here!» Complimentary breadsticks, family chain style at best — I’ve had better out of the grocery freezer, kid you not. I’ve never had Osso Bucco before, so it’s quite possible that I just don’t like the cut, but I can’t shake the notion that this was one of the worst cuts of meat I’ve ever had in a restaurant, yet it was at the upper end of my price range. I’m told that fiancée’s swordfish was passable. Our baked potatoes were dried out to the point where only the core was edible.
We tried this place not because we heard good things, but because we got steeply discounted gift certificates in a promotion. Bad play! The remaining one will go unused. In DC, even moreso in lower-​tax Silver Spring, at the $ 30 entrée price point, the culinary world is your oyster. Not here. (I also got a whispered, «This hollandaise is baaaaad,» and I think, the same about the asparagus. Culinary clusterfrak.)
Also, service. Any place that has two waitstaff and two occupied tables, when my beer glass empties, the tip drops. My fiancée did a lot of calling out to get service, I mean, the other table didn’t care. They were pretty obviously just there because the place is in the lobby of their hotel. And I get the feeling that most of my price went to Hilton’s rent rather than the kitchen or my plate. «Never again» is small-​minded; I’ll try every other place in Silver Spring before I’ll be back here. If their prices drop.