Bryan Hayslett
Google
We made a reservation with high hopes and with two of our party having a great experience once before. The restaurant is beautiful, with a knowledgeable and attentive waitstaff, but the food was unremarkable.
We elected to have the chef’s choice menu when we made the reservation, which in my experience means the chef creates a progression of dishes for the diners. Instead, our waitstaff seemed to be choosing dishes off the menu as we went, essentially serving us a set of recommended plates rather than a combination curated by the chef. Ultimately, the cost of the food was not worth it.
The cocktails were good (one of them was excellent), and we started with a tapas-style focaccia topped with aioli and tomato salsa with silverfish and avocado in leche de tigre. The dish was balanced and good, but nothing that I’ll be thinking about next week. We also had a salad with figs, an interesting but overly simple-flavored tortilla in a red sauce, pasta with clams (not nearly enough sauce, so the dish came across dry). Then, two dishes for specific discussion:
1) tuna with a potato puree: the tuna is the reason I am giving 3 stars instead of 1. This dish was the most excellent tuna that I have had in a very long time. The texture was phenomenal, and there were many levels of flavor with the soy sauce and mirin. The potato puree was fine but unexceptional.
2) our final dish was fish (cooked well but unimpressive flavor) in a curry sauce accompanied by ají amarillo stuffed with a paste of banana. Never have I had such a strange combination of flavors, and it didn’t work for me. As well, the soft paste oozed out when cutting the tougher pepper. The curry and fish felt unrelated to this odd stuffed pepper, and nothing about it worked for me.
With the exception of our final dish, nothing was bad, and one dish was beyond excellent. However, I would expect to pay half the price or to have a quality of food that is twice as good.
