It pains me to write this review because I really wanted to love this place. We love the sister…read morerestaurant, Bar Pigalle, and were hoping for much the same.
First, the good... We LOVED the cocktails. They were big, strong, fascinating, unique and delicious. Very reasonably priced for what you get. I would rate these as my #1 cocktail of the year so far. We had 3-4 different ones over the course of the night, all great.
Next to the apps. We ordered the cheese board, and were disappointed to be served what looked like scraps of cheese kind of sloppily thrown on a board with some crackers and jam. Humboldt Fog is a completely unique concoction with a blue line of ash through the middle, ash on the outside and the cheese kind of getting softer on the edges from interacting with the ash, and age. It is beautiful to look at, but needs to be served in a way where all of that is visible. Our portion looked like somebody scooped it out of a wheel and kind of smeared it on the board. Just random chunks and pieces. The other cheeses were fine, but not exactly presented in a great way.
Bread was good, the onion butter was interesting, though not to everybody's taste. But for a $10 bread app, just kind of expected more here.
Entrees. Burger was 10/10. Delicious. Fries are an extra $9. Seems like an $17 burger needs something with it. But it was great.
Thai grilled shrimp were delicious, with a delicious creamy red curry sauce. The other stuff (melon, cucumber, basil, mint) didn't really seem to be very present, and the entree contains only 3 shrimp, a fact that our waiter helpfully warned us about. For a $40 entree with pretty much only shrimp and sauce, that is $13.33 per shrimp, but who is counting!
Yummy, but definitely felt a bit taken here.
NY Strip. An average NY strip with an average Au Poivre sauce. Not even a discernible hint of the promised Szechuan pepper. Everybody tried the sauce trying to find it, nobody did. Steakhouse pricing without the Steakhouse.
SIdes:
Antipasti: Inedible. Looked bad, tasted bad, nobody could figure out what they were trying to do. We hated them. $17
Smashed potatoes: Everybody disliked these as well. Nobody could really figure out what they were supposed to be, but what they came out as were kind of lukewarm and flavor-challenged with no really identifiable bacon or cheddar or scallions. The cheddar seemed to be Kraft dinner powdered cheese. They were weird. Hated these too. $14
Mac & Cheese: This was good though not $17 worth of good.
Then the power went out. We had all of our food and you could see, so no problem for us. It had the potential to be kind of fun, and we seemed to be at the end of the night, so no worries there. But the staff kind of got annoyed, our waiter (who we liked) disappeared and we were not offered anything else, no drinks, water, dessert. I realize that it is a giant PAIN IN THE ASS to close a restaurant with no power, but that is not the fault of your customers who just happened to be there when the power failed. At least make an effort to try to be hospitable.
At the end of the night, we felt that the drinks were GREAT, some of the food was really good, and a lot of it just missed. Did we hit a bad night? New cooks? Order the wrong things? Not sure. Just felt that they were really pushing it on the value/pricing scale. and for the $400 we spent for 4 people with a (big) tip I just expect something a bit greater than what we got.
Has potential, but probably not going to risk another $400 to find out.
