When I made the reservation I had a maybe unusual standard for how I planned to rate this place and…read moreit wasn't based on the food or price or wine list or much of anything you might want to know about. It all started in Santa Monica in 1989, on Academy Awards night. This little buildup probably won't seem very relevant to many here but so what, it's about how well a high-end restaurant receives people with infants.
I'm unlikely to have, not to say unworthy of, more than one grandchild. And this one won't see much of dear old grandpa being that my son and family live in Vancouver. Not a great distance to travel but on the other hand it's not next door. Plus the maternal grandparents moved from Connecticut to live in a coastal community located maybe 50 miles from the border. All-wise grandmothers being the helicopters they truly are, what does anyone need this degenerate hedonist for?
Well, for one thing the parents need a chance to relive the excesses and finery that they once tasted, as part of their affluent lives before parenthood. while i don't know how to comfort a relentlessly colicy 3-month old i do know how to enjoy the best restaurants in town, or at least ones that will take my reservation. I suggested the Blue Water based on one friend's approval and all were happy. now as to the 1989 academy awards and a well-known restaurant in the day, Chinois.
at the time i had a small child in tow, not quite the infant stage of this current vintage but young enough still to be driven by the primeval lizard brainstem than the more highly evolved human cerebral cortex of its brain. i warned the restaurant when making the reservation and was told that, yes, this particular evening they would be quite busy with revelers from the awards ceremony but if we came at 5 pm they would happily accommodate us with young child. just so happens, that exactly almost what the Blue Water said when I called for our reservation.
I suppose the best to do is describe the food we ordered. In advance i invited the young couple to do as much damage to my credit card as they wanted, as they'd been cooped up for the past 4 months with this infant. their first choice was this damned seafood tower which seemed to me beforehand, and after as well, to be more a kind of concept product. i'd have preferred to order individual plates of various shellfish, oysters or whatever, than this multilayer assemblage. but it is a showy kind of construction and what did i care, really. everything on the three tiers was quite fresh and tasty except i'd have foregone the shrimp. really shrimp are in my mind more than a bit overrated and don't belong in the same plate with fresh "varietal" oysters from here or there.
aside from the tower we ordered a few different sushi, my favorite being yellowtale, plus carrot soup all around (healthy dose of butter there), mains were arctic char, sable and atlantic scallops. if available i have a kind of fetish for sauteed spinach (as a kind of audition dish), and someone wanted an extra round of oysters from i don't know where. after mentally doing a little math i realized the total seemed lightweight, but the wine list took care of that problem. my favorite white wine is chablis grand cru made/bottled by a vigneron (grapegrower/winemaker under one roof). anything else is either a lower tier vineyard or a blend which, while good, lacks a sense of origin. some use a term "terroir" which i ignore but maybe it's more that i ignore the people who like to bandy such abstract wine descriptors about. anyway, here was a perfectly good les clos, about 6 years old, for i think around $250 canadian. i have also to point out that i've been disappointed with almost every euro wine i've had in canada, owing i suspect to the high duty the government places on all imported wine in effort to protect its own ham-handed, homegrown products, which are usually absolutely nothing to write home about. fortunately this particular bottle of chablis was really really good. after all that we had various desserts, and whatever.
at Chinois on academy awards night, we arrived at 5 pm and were seated in a very prominent location in the room, but with a plastic sheet under the child's seat. this was a good thought on the part of the manager. without going into any details best to say my 2-yr old made a mess of things but the waitstaff could not have been more accepting. i was frankly impressed, as i was when our dinner at Blue Water came to an end. So my score is 4 for food (i really don't know what it would take to get 5* from me, so take that for what it is) and 1* for absolutely perfect service.
Highly recommend this very stylish restaurant for whatever occasion.