D O.
Yelp
A Farewell to Bacchus -- and to Hope
There are restaurants where the food speaks. At Bacchus, the food mumbles incoherently and then dies in your mouth.
I arrived with low expectations and left wondering if I'd somehow offended someone in a past life. Our reservation was for 8:00 p.m. on Father's Day -- a date that should have signaled celebration. Instead, it became a quietly operatic farce. We were seated promptly, which in hindsight may have been the restaurant's final act of competence. Our drinks -- one glass of wine, a Coke, and a club soda -- arrived after a mysterious ten-minute vanishing act, at which point we were told the kitchen would be closing in ten minutes. Nothing stokes the appetite quite like a ticking clock and the subtle suggestion that you're inconveniencing the staff by being there.
The menu read like a eulogy to inspiration: penne, penne, and more penne. We began with the "charred rare sirloin," a dish so audacious in its poverty of substance that it should be considered conceptual art. Five nearly translucent slivers of beef arrived, each whisper-thin and curled at the edges, as if even the meat itself were recoiling from the plate. It came with a slick of something allegedly chimichurri, though it had the texture of hospital-grade aloe vera and the color of regret.
The tapenade with crostini was, charitably, a salt lick in drag. The crostini were the kind of weaponized toast points one might use to chisel ice from a sidewalk in February.
Then came the entrees, each one a sonnet to mediocrity. The butter penne was butter penne. The pesto penne was butter penne with something green in it. The sautéed artichokes appeared, looking vaguely stunned to have been invited. The "Italian sausage with penne" lacked sausage altogether -- an omission that might have gone unnoticed had it not been the name of the dish. Our server offered an apology and said she wouldn't charge us "for it," which I took to mean the entire dish. A rare flicker of generosity? Not quite. The sausage did eventually arrive -- ten minutes later, as if it had just come off a break -- but I was still privileged enough to be charged for the cold, lonely penne that had been sitting on the plate like a bored dinner guest waiting for its date to show up. Apparently, at Bacchus, even the sausage has a union -- and the pasta pays the price.
To her credit, the server offered us a complimentary dessert -- a gracious gesture that almost redeemed the evening, until the crème brûlée arrived. It was crème, certainly. But the brûlée had either been forgotten, forgiven, or tragically misunderstood. A soft custard sat beneath a loose sprinkle of granulated sugar, like a torch had been waved in its general direction before the kitchen staff clocked out.
We paid, we left, we mourned. I've been to Bacchus before, but this visit confirmed what I had long suspected: the restaurant is not declining -- it has simply given up. It no longer cooks; it shrugs. It no longer serves; it apologizes. Bacchus is a restaurant only in the technical sense. Spiritually, it's an obligation with a wine list.
At Bacchus, the gods may still be watching -- but they've clearly stopped tasting.
