Samuel C.
Yelp
In general, not worth the money or the calories.
Currently, not helped by the labor shortage.
* * *
We had stopped going to Chez Zee thirty years ago.
At Chez Zee the desserts were always amazing.
The desserts were a treat that would absolutely be the basis for a destination visit.
But you put up with a lot to get those desserts.
The dinner before your dessert would generally be expensive and mediocre.
Plus they always had a cocktail pianist from hell.
Loud, uncreative, and awful.
Vamping in the left hand. Pointless noodling in the right hand.
All of the "opposite-of-coolness" of Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians - with none of the retro charm.
It was a place grandmothers took their families to treat them (or vice versa).
The teenagers got through it putting on their "be nice to grandma" faces.
* * *
Flash forward thirty years.
We give them a fresh try for old time's sake.
Everything bad is still there.
There is new bad stuff.
The place is mobbed.
They need to have valet parking at 11 in the morning.
With the prices they charge and the people pouring into the house,
They could run the place as a cash cow.
They are way past having to listen to Yelp Reviews.
Integrity wise, management believes in what it is doing.
Management is trying to produce a "nice" restaurant that is highly traditional, serves classic upscale American dishes, appeals to a straight-arrow audience, and has a polished celebratory special-occasion kind of feel.
Canada is full of restaurants like that. That is a harder kind of place to find in Austin. The Tarrytown, Mesa and Jester Estates markets like that kind of restaurant.
Chez Zee serves a legitimate need.
* * *
But the Execution is falling apart.
I blame labor shortage for a lot of this.
My "reason-for-coming" dessert was an Italian Cream Cake.
It was an utterly mediocre version.
Tasteless cake and frosting. Overly rich and excessive frosting. Dead coconut.
No thrills.
A tuna salade nicoise with tasteless tuna. They provide tartare sauce in which to dip the tuna. It needed it - because the tuna might as well have been tofu.
Boring vegetables in the salad and boring dressing.
Average omelet with a lot of filling (good point on quantity.)
Good shrimp bisque.
Mediocre boring bar programme. I had a marginal jalapeno margarita.
* * *
The piano is now MUCH MUCH worse than before.
The piano now has a boom box making it twice as loud and the music twice as stupid.
* * *
But the big crash is in service.
They had too few workers to be able to remotely handle the brunchtime rush.
Everything fell apart.
A dish with salsa came with no salsa. Coffee was served out of the pot lukewarm. A waiter was terribly confused when he found we had already gotten our shrimp soup. Silverware was cleared between courses and never replaced. Coffee was spilled all over the floor while being poured. Table cleanings were partial leaving finished dirty ingredients on the table for the rest of the meal.
And there was more than that.
The workers were nice enough, trying to do their jobs, and were working their bananas off.
But they were simply overwhelmed.
* * *
For a memorable dessert, I am willing to put up with a lot.
For cloying and tasteless, my tolerance goes way down.
The bill settled the matter once and for all.
There are people out there in the waiting area who want my table.
They can have it.
