John Li
Google
Completely mediocre. All style no substance. Overall misses the mark of a two Michelin restaurant! Two???? Are you kidding me? This just show that Michelin is soooo hit and miss, and that they have no clue what good delicious food is if they think being able to artistically plate defines it.
1) food was over seasoned in almost all of the dishes except for the main duck course. Completely lacks balance, and I’m left perplexed one dish after the other what the message or flavor was supposed to be, it’s just all salt. A few of the low points of the meal:
The lobster was completely overcooked and drained of its juiciness, how is that different from canned frozen lobster? The bounce of the meet was completely gone, murdered such beautiful ingredient.
The seaweed butter croissant was completely over the top rich with nothing to balance, TOO much butter for that small pastry bite, my wife did not even finish 1/3. You were just drinking butter at that point.
The crispy tartare dish oh my god I’m glad I didn’t get food poisoning, the fish actually tasted like it’s been sitting around for 12 hours unrefrigerated.
2) Pros were the duck dish, appreciated the craftsmanship, saucing potatoes and vegetables, etc and that dish’s effort rose to the level of fine dining, but at this price point I expect nothing less. Also for the oyster, they were quite generous with the caviar leaving it for the table to have as much as we wanted, but again, price point appropriate.
3) all the desserts were forgettable. Those little sweet bites especially the egg/creme pastry one was actually disgusting, cannot believe they served that, shell was not crispy nor had any buttery flavor, center was over baked and cold, horrendous texture. If this was a take on pastel de nata…. Face palm.
4) the tortellini pasta dish was again over salted sauce with no real balance of flavor. Neither the addition of a little foam sauce to the dry pasta, nor the white truffle shavings manage to save the uninteresting filling and cooking. Also somehow their white truffle tastes stale, not sure what the reason is but no real perfume came through
5) chocolates at the end were overly sweet with nothing to remember them by, could have bought them at the supermarket and you wouldn’t know the different. Lindor would have been preferable for god sakes.
6) service staff was under trained, at one point one guy started re introducing me to the whole menu mid meal, when another guy pointed out his mistake he quickly ran away. The dishes introduction had no substance and they were in a hurry to get out of there as fast as possible. At the end we were 2 couples and wanted to split the bill in half, since I ordered champagne and white truffle, I wanted the extra charge on my credit card it came out to about 850 USD. Surprisingly, this took two different people coming to our table 3 times to confirm what needed to be done. Also no smiles by the end and actually I think they were a little annoyed we wanted to split our bill? The level of.service at the end was actually hilariously bad, Michelin star or not.
Overall I had high hopes, but was extremely disappointed. I highly recommend you NOT to try this restaurant, given there are so many good options in the area. I hope they take away their stars because this is an insult to the culinary arts.
