At ‘Love & Hip-Hop’ star’s Red Room Bistro, food feels beside the point

The first thing I can say about Red Room Bistro, the downtown restaurant from “Love & Hip-Hop: Atlanta” star Karlie Redd, is that I had fun both times I visited.

Though much of the credit goes to my colleagues (the ladies of the “It’s UATL” podcast and others), Red Room Bistro is a place designed to have a good time. The music, a mixture of decade-jumping pop, hip-hop, Caribbean and R&B hits, is engaging and infectious. In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Redd said she curated the playlist herself.

The layout of the main dining area, with large, red velvet-upholstered booths open to the room, creates a convivial, social atmosphere. Complete with plenty of photo-friendly design touches, Red Room Bistro is clearly a place to see and be seen.

In my conversation with Redd and her team, I tried to gauge how they had positioned the business. Though Red Room Bistro is open until 2 a.m. five nights a week and offers hookah service, they see it, first and foremost, as a restaurant rather than a lounge or nightclub.

The food and experience, however, suggest the focus is elsewhere. And the kitchen displayed missteps that could be attributed to either inexperience or inattention to detail.

It was difficult to get an idea of the typical atmosphere at Red Room Bistro because our reservations were on the early side. We visited for dinner at 7:30 p.m. one weeknight and brunch on a Saturday at 11:30 a.m. During both visits, our group was among the first tables to be seated.

We were served by the manager, who was welcoming and relaxed. Though she was personable and proficient, we experienced some delays as her attention occasionally drifted to other tasks, an experience I’ve found common when restaurants are less busy.

We had a more serious hiccup in service when we ordered our appetizers, including a kebab typically made with beef, but which the manager said could be made with chicken. We asked for chicken, but the kebabs delivered to the table were beef cooked so well-done that it required a group discussion to determine which meat we’d been served.

Another appetizer of mozzarella bites gave a clue that not all of the food in the kitchen was prepared from scratch. The deep-fried quarter-circles of cheese were heavily breaded, but one of my dining partners bit into a piece where the cheese was entirely absent. It’s difficult to imagine how a pocket of breading without any cheese might have ended up in the fryer if the cooks had been making the dish by hand.

The misfire on the cheese created questions about another dish we ordered as an appetizer, the lobster roll. The dish was a deal at $25 and included enormous chunks of lightly-fried lobster meat. Redd said she kept the price low because she wanted the dish to be affordable, but she did not provide any details about how the lobster was sourced.

Red Room Bistro did a better job with the brunch menu, especially the ultra-creamy grits that could be ordered as a side but also took center stage in an entree with shrimp or salmon. The red velvet waffles served alongside fried chicken were tasty, too, with a nice texture and a flavor that was not overly sweet.

The fried chicken was cooked well but had a strangely crumbly breading that mostly fell off the skin. The vegetarian Red Light Omelet was among the best dishes I tried, the warm eggs folded around a fresh spring mix.

While Red Room Bistro seems to work better for brunch, there was another disconcerting aspect to our experience. During our meal, a separate group was hosting some sort of branded event. Two videographers were filming the happenings in the back half of the restaurant, and several times I noticed them filming our table as well. They seemed to be simply capturing b-roll for their video, but there wasn’t any photo release signage in the restaurant and no one asked permission to film our group. When making a reservation at Red Room Bistro, diners must check a box agreeing to the restaurant’s terms and conditions, but I couldn’t find any information about what the terms and conditions entailed.