Boy, I feel bad before I even begin on this write-up. As soon as I walked in I could see that this restaurant was having a bad day by the crowd of customers crowding around an unmanned front of house.
But how much slack should you cut a restaurant for running on the edge? It's not like there's an automatic 10% off when they know they're too busy to deal with you in a timely manner or with any attention to service.
I had a reservation, and was kept waiting nearly 20m, which is generally acceptable to me at dinner but not really for lunch, our table wasn't set when we were brought in and service was SLOW. Our waitress got in the excuses early - before even taking our orders she let us know how very busy she was and how badly the restaurant had let her down by not assigning another server to help her.
Ok, so logistically the place was in a state, but the food might still be great right? The concept is simple - you choose your main dish, and then choose what sauce you want to go with it. Well, that didn't apply to my starter - I went for chowder, and plenty of the other starters and salads were off-concept too with little or no choice of sauces. Why bother having a high concept restaurant and then making a menu that doesn't live up to it?
Mutterings from the table next door about the food quality didn't bode well, but we had no time to go elsewhere so we forged on. Pei mussels looked good, but were reported as average. My skirt steak was inaccurately cooked (I asked for medium/rare, got the top end of medium). Only sign of the sauce concept in action was with the fries which had a passable aioli and a rather industrial bearnaise as accompanyment. It would take an act of god, or at least a free meal, to tempt me back into this place. High-Sauciety it was not.
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