Restaurants near Carmel Village Plaza Shopping Center

So yummy! I love that it wasn’t slammed & the servers weren’t hurried.

My husband and I are so pleased with our choice to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary at the AVANT. The service was outstanding! Exceptional experience since the beginning of our arrival to the farewell! The food is definitely the main reason we made our reservation here! Our friend highly recommended this restaurant and I am so glad we came here for our special day! We ordered the chef’s garden and charred broccolis with Blu Bass and Duck Breast for the entrée. I finished every bit of the Blu Bass! Highly recommend to anyone who calls him/her self a foodie! From the first timer dinners

We had only just recently discovered The Shop, and figured we'd check it out. After sharing a yummy bruschetta appetizer, we decided to design our own pizza. Admittedly, we made a minor error in ordering a large pizza (for two to share), but figured leftovers would be fine to take home. When the pizza came to our table, all of our toppings were huddled in the middle of the pizza. We were a little confused as to how none of the veggies had made it closer to the edge. With the pile of toppings in the middle, the center of the pizza was more than a little soggy. It was still tasty, but not all the way to the crust. It was a little weird. More, because we decided that the limited selection of specialty pizzas didn't strike our fancy (do people still say that?), we ordered our own combination of vegetables for our pizza. In the end, our pizza came out to $45-- steep even at San Diego prices. Aside from the pile of toppings in the middle, each topping ($3.50 for each topping?! Outrageous!) was far overpriced for the amount of toppings used. (Note: the price per topping is listed, but it's a bit of an afterthought on the menu and the server provided no reminder). It will be a long time before we decide to drop a pile of cash on an overpriced pizza that was rushed through the kitchen. Overall rating: Disappointing.

Made a reservation because had 2 small children with me was told I would need to wait 15 minutes - would have been waiting longer if I hadn’t gone back to the desk and reminded her that we were still waiting after 20 minutes - she seemed to have several lists she was going off of and my name had gotten lost in the shuffle. She had a tablet she was looking at so not sure why she had so many paper lists also.