M G
Google
I was invited for dinner in this restaurant. The entire experience is… hmm🤔 like visit a new trend start-up gallery, people points at an abstract painting with two lines on the paper, and told you it worths 200millons and all the main stream comments told you it’s a piece of art. If you don’t agree, it seems that’s your problem.
The menu is over-priced, the potion is extremely tiny out of your lowest expectation. The presentation is not a stunning level. The most important thing: it ‘s not delicious. There’s no layer of flavor, no complication of delicated combination of different food material, the main plat is just too salty. And guess what, they use “eco-friendly” story-telling strategy to use low-cost food material for a €135 menu: one dish is 3 pieces of different colors carrots, one dish is brocolli (with the portion served, I doubt one night did the whole kitchen even finished 1 entire carrot or one entire brocolli or not)
You may argue that it’s because I don’t understand gastronomic high level meal. However, I love food and I don’t mind if I find delicious food on street stand or in Michelin restaurant. In Paris there’re a lot of mid-level and high level gastronomic restaurant. By mid-level, I mean restaurant 6-7temps menu in €70-€80 level, and most of their plats are with a reasonable portion(still small but not tiny), and served with various seasonal food material and with complicated work, you can see the passion and thoughts of the chef, you can feel surprise when you taste every dish, you can feel from your heart that it’s delicious and it touches your soul sometimes. By high end restaurants, I mean those 6-8temps menu more than €100+, a lot of these restaurants are not only just with the food materials and complicated work I mentioned before, it also comes with the whole experience: from location, entire restaurant decoration, the unique story-telling of every dish, the ceremonial perfect service… no matter which level it is, the only important thing is, I can feel genuinely that I enjoy the food, that I feel the beauty and I get the passion the chef shared.
Unfortunately, for this restaurant, every dish served is lower than my expectation: portion, presentation, material, taste, imagination, complication… the location and decoration are also average-bistro level. The service is… well, it’s not bad, but they’re trying hard to make it cool-luxurious, as clients, we felt a bit… snob. (BTW the next day we’ve been in Regina to have dinner and the service there was also luxurious, but we felt warm, considerate and elegant. It’s very weird how we as clients can sense the difference from similar service, but that’s how we felt)
I try to be fair for all my reviews. With words you may not see the difference, so I put 3 photos of comparison below: I compare entrée/main plat/dessert from €135 menu Anona with other mid-level bistros in Paris that I tasted. To avoid ad, I don’t put any other restaurants’ name, the dishes are from different restaurants I tried. You can see easily from photos the difference of food material, cuisine complication, presentation art and price range. You can easily tell which chef is more passionate for what he’s doing.