We went up to Auburn to stop into Bootleggers for their Wednesday Date Night thing, unfortunately they were full, so we tried this place.
I think if you haven't been to other nice restaurants in the area, it might be something, but I just wasn't impressed.
First, the menu. There are like, 4 or 5 choices for entrees, I think if I were going to craft a simple menu like that, I wouldn't start with unpopular stuff like a lamb shank or duck. In this case, 2 of the 5 were those two. Appetizers... hard to get excited about stuff made from ground up organ meat.
After a lot of debate between the only two things on the menu that even sounded tasty, the steak or the "Louisiana shrimp & grits", I decided to give the shrimp & grits a try, my wife tried the steak. Both were very so/so.
I agree with other reviews, I used to live in the South, and was just in New Orleans a couple of months ago actually and stayed at the Sheraton on Canal Street and we experimented with a lot of food in the French Quarter. Nothing about the "Louisiana Shrimp & Grits" tasted anything like creole food. It was supposed to be shrimp and andouille sausage over some kind of grits... similar to jambalaya I was guessing?
The sauce or whatever was on it, was pretty bland. Maybe butter-based, not like the roux that someone in the Quarter would have been working on for a couple of hours. The "Grits" were like a polenta or something, ground up to the consistency of really mashed potatoes, the shrimp was "ok", didn't taste fishy, but didn't really taste like anything at all. They were the tiny popcorn size, probably previously frozen... not exactly the Gulf shrimp I was imagining.
The andouille wasn't exactly sausage, it was more like bland bacon bits, and just a ground up sprinkling of it. I don't think there were even any vegetables on the dish, just the mashed polenta thing, a bunch of butter, maybe 5 or 6 popcorn shrimp and the bacon bits. Serving size was pretty sad, maybe 5 or 6 ounces, about the size of the oatmeal serving at a Starbucks. The price - $25.00. I'm sorry, but it was pretty insulting and even though I ate the thing, I left quite hungry, even after several bread plates. I think they were going for the world's lowest calorie count at the highest possible price - each warm bread plate had 2 very thin slices of bread on it, cut in half (for two of us and about a 40 minute wait overall).
My wife had the "Manhattan Steak"... kind of a New York strip. Smallest one I've ever seen. Maybe 3- 5 ounces. SImple steak served over maybe 3 or 4 ounces of root veggies. $30.00. It tasted good, just really small. She sliced it thin to kind of savor it.
Neither dish included a salad.. The salads on the menu didn't actually sound that appetizing, and I eat mixed green / arugula / spinach salads around 5 or 6 days a week. The saucer-sized salads are another $10 or so if you want one.
We tried this appetizer thing, mixed cheese & "meats". The "meats" were 4 slices of salami, not a dry one, just a Pepperidge Farm kind of thing (thin / deli cut slices). Came with 3 or 4 crisp toasted slices of bread, 2 small pieces of cheese - maybe 1 ounce total, and a few olives and quince about the size of a sugar cube (none of this is exaggerated). $14.00.
The wine, I wasn't impressed, all Central Valley stuff for the most part, I didn't see anything that was more than $7 to $9 a bottle at BevMo. The prices really were not bad though for a wine bar environment, around $30 a bottle or so. Odd, that a Mediterranean / French inspired restaurant didn't have any French or Italian wines on the menu. Just below-average "anything-but-Napa" local stuff. I was craving a good chianti. nada. I opted for the single import on the wine list.. kind of had to choke it down. Very weak, not much flavor.
Ambience. Ok, so, for around $120 for 2 glasses of wine and the 2 smallest dishes I've ever ordered, and an appetizer that was a 1/4 order of a tapa downtown, you would expect a little more than a 30 inch bicycle-wheel sized table and a couple of barely-comfortable bistro chairs. The ambience just wasn't there for me. You're also kind of piled into the wine case storage area, maybe they were going for a theme, but it's really just crowded. The whole place is about the size of a small antique store.
Execution - I think they try really hard, but seemed really scripted, I didn't see a lot of personality. The wait staff try to look sophisticated by delivering each other's food, like the assistant waiter would at a more established establishment. In this case, I only saw two people, and they were messing up the table destinations for the food a little. It seemed pretty strange.
There are much better and well-executed places in the region - try a few of these instead:
Moxie - midtown Sacramento w/ real food / real wine... Bootleggers... across the street. Hawk's... Granite Bay. Land & Ocean.. Folsom. read more