Anna S.
Yelp
Our evening at Bar Cart started well enough. We were about 15 minutes early for our reservation, and pleasantly surprised when the hostess said she could seat us right away. Though she was true to her word and gave us a table, it took at least 15 minutes before the server came to take our drink orders. Someone brought us water during this period. When the server arrived she brought a second set of waters, and when she saw we already had water, she simply gave us the additional waters and didn't take the ones we had been drinking. Not a big deal, except the tables were tiny, so when our apps and drinks arrived we were moving things up onto the wall beside us for space. The server asked "have you had a chance to take a look at the menus" and we sort of chuckled to ourselves, because we had had AMPLE time to consider our options. She was sweet, complemented my outfit, and we moved along with our evening.
We ordered drinks (a caiparinha and a beer) a citrus arugula salad and burrata with pesto, and...waited. The restaurant was busy but not wildly so, and there appeared to be two servers, a bar tender and a hostess so it didn't seem understaffed. We waited another 10 minutes or so for our drinks and appetizers. The caiparinha was bright, limey and refreshing. The burrata was very tasty - spicy and herbal pesto, the toasts were fine. The burrata itself was not the creamiest/most delicious I've had but it was totally yummy. The salad was overdressed and not really tossed, so it was just kind of a wet pile of arugula on top of some citrus medallions that still had a lot of pith on them. This is an odd thing to complain about, and it's not a problem per se, but the appetizer portions were huge - maybe double what I would expect - and so we felt a little weird about not finishing them, but also like we wanted to save room for our mains. We finished our drinks probably halfway through the appetizers, but were not offered another until the server came quite a while later to take our mains order.
The service had been so choppy and slow at this point that we checked in with each other about whether we should order mains there or leave and go somewhere else. My dining companion was psyched about the short rib ragu so we decided to stay. I got the mussels. We ordered a second round of drinks. As she had with each of our orders the server gave us an enthusiastic "great choice" for each item we ordered - totally flat and without any personal knowledge or enthusiasm for the (admittedly not very interesting) food. My partner and I were joking that I couldn't even take her comments about my outfit seriously because she seemed to have no taste.
My mussels came and I started eating them when I found one that hadn't opened. No big deal, I put it in the bowl for the shells, and reached for another. Also unopened. I ate 1-2 opened ones, then found another closed tight in its shell. I've always been told that unopened shellfish are dead/potentially poisonous, and honestly I have no idea if this is true but my internal alarms were going off. I started counting the closed mussels. There were 7. In a bowl of maybe 15 mussels. So nearly half of my order was inedible. I had some of my partner's ragu, and caught the server's attention when I could. I told her what I wrote here - I've been told not to eat unopened mussels, there are a lot of them, not asking for my money back just wanted the kitchen to be aware. She said "oh yes the kitchen is aware, we were already informed of this issue by another table and we are cutting the mussels from the menu tonight." Cool cool cool, would have been great if you'd let me know of the issue, since I've been sitting here...eating them. I am also a little stumped by the fact that someone plated this food and didn't notice the sheer volume of unopened mussels in the bowl.
So, we decided not to get dessert, got the bill, they comped the mussels, we accidentally double tipped because of the stupid 20% surcharge, and we will not be returning. As we left the hostess said in a jaded drawl "sorry about the mussellllllsssss."
P.S. In a completely snarky sidenote, the decor looks like it was sourced from Wayfair, and the wallpaper was not even applied smoothly. It was like someone's idea of what a cool restaurant should look like, but they didn't quite get there.
P.P. S. The food was totally passable (apart from the mussels) and the experience could have been saved with better service, but the service really killed the experience.