West Steak Seafood & Spirits   

You will not regret making West a dining destination. Great food and awesome service. Ruth's Chris is very good, Donovan's is very good, but they aren't in North County and West is every bit as good. The appetizer menu is great and the desserts are worth saving some room.

Great food, great service! I ******* was a little bigger so I could get in without a reservation. It's great to finally get a great steak in Carlsbad. My wife raves about the seafood and I love the beef. I've eaten here several times and I've never had an experience that was less than outstanding. Yes, it's a little pricey, but that helps keep the customer quality high.

We took a trip up North last weekend to see what all the hoopla was about some very wealthy midwestern man building a couple restaurants and hotel in Carlsbad. For lunch we went to their bistro and for dinner we tried their steak house. Although it's always nice to see something new in the area, we were very unimpressed with the food and the prices were way too steep. We also felt that they really didn't fit in to the surrounding community of Carlsbad. We thought the whole thing was just okay. We won't be going back.

Our highly anticipated experience in this new restaurant was unfortunately less than expected. First , when entering the restaurant, you immediately notice that the bar area occupies a third of the entire square room from the mid right. The dining area is flanked center left. In the back you see a waiter area and open kitchen. Although everything was decorated nicely, the bar area and bar crowd was too noisy and dominated and disctracted us from our dining conversation. But of more importance was the food. We have dined at the best steakhouses across the country. It is clear that they use the standard USDA Prime beef but it comes up short from steakhouses like Ruths Chris and Donovan's and others when it comes to cooking techinque and FLAVOR. We even tried some of their sauces, but they too were not special. For the high price, we expected much better. It's easy to tell the chef and cooks did not come from top notch steakhouses. Our group also tasted some seafood appetizers that we admit had very nice presentations. We felt that they were sprinkled with too much of this and too much of that ,where it was too confusing for our tastebuds. For example, the crab cakes had way too many flavors going on and masked the true sweet jumbo lump crab meat. There were several other things we didn't like. As stated before, the room is one simple square. It was dark, had no windows and no view. Also, the staff and managers were staring at us too much which didn't give us much privacy. But what really turned us off was when we were greeted by an elderly gentleman, I guess a Manager or Owner. When our discussion turned to a nearby competitor and his comments were slightly negative, we felt this negativity or jealousy was not the tone to have when you are new to our community. Lastly, what's the deal with all of those security cameras???? Our recommendation: go to Donovans, Flemings or Ruths Chris or better yet drive up to Mastro's in Costa Mesa for a real dining experience.