Upon arrival at 1894, you are seated and champagne is brought to the table with impressive speed…read more You are about to find out as you sip your champagne that this is part of either a four course or a six course prix-fixe menu, which costs either 129 or 179 dollars per person, and these menus are the only option. These will be paired with wine. If you don't drink alcohol, that's fine, simply pay exactly the same price and they won't bring the wine.
It turns out that all of the menus you may have found online were incorrect and outdated. There is no official website for the restaurant itself, and therefore perusal of an accurate menu had been impossible, but you couldn't have known that. You simply thought you were looking at a current and much more reasonably priced a la carte menu. If you HAD known all the information online was inaccurate you might have called the restaurant and asked where you could find a menu to look at and they would have said "we have two prix-fixe menus, one is 129 and one is 179 and... hello?... hello?".
As you are learning all this you are now sitting sipping what you may have initially thought was complimentary champagne, and so you might feel obligated to stay, which is probably exactly the point: you can't leave now, you're already drinking the champagne.
If you drink alcohol, and you had planned to order something resembling a four course meal anyway, 129 dollars could certainly be considered a good deal, especially considering the very high quality of the food and service there, and the terrific view of the grounds and the ambiance of the dining room.
This becomes significantly attenuated however when half your group doesn't drink, and no one in your group had even been planning on having an appetizer, or dessert, given that you have tickets the symphony that begins at 8, and even though it's only 6:30 you're now about to embark on a four course meal that will likely make you miss the first half of the show, but that's OK because you don't really care for Berlioz anyway, but you might even miss the beginning of the second half of the show, and therefore lose your seats, but they'll still let you sit in the shed, just further away, much further away. How does Vermont sound?
And so given that the menu that you looked at online was comparatively quite inexpensive, you are now paying something very close to 4 times the amount you'd expected. And you are also missing your show, because the service, which was quite excellent considering the times we live in at the moment, is still, on this relative scale, in this situation, too slow.
If you know going in that you are going to pay something like at least 160 dollars with tax and tip per person, if you somehow managed to figure that out against all odds, it's a very good place to go. So now you know.
