I went with the expectation of this being a fairly small, unpretentious spot... I mean, "bistro" - it's the definition of the word. And "simple fare", French homestyle cooking, no doubt fancied up. It was clear immediately on entering that this isn't a small place - it's a huge old home that's been converted to a restaurant. Yet, at the same time, the tables are spaced so far apart that in truth, there are under 30 people in the dining room, that could easily be arranged for double that. I also wouldn't put the space down as casual, but hey, the waitstaff aren't all that formal - the food runners are in black t-shirts and pants, and the waitstaff and managers are in open collared shirts and slacks, but we're all good here. There's a semi-open kitchen at the back of the room, and Gualtieri and team are back there cooking up a storm.
Service is a bit haphazard. They've clearly subscribed to some sort of "keep moving and you'll look busy" ethos. The half dozen folk attending to customers are constantly on the move, circulating around the tables, approaching, moving away, it's very distracting, and by the end of the night, just plain annoying. At one point I see one of the food runners/buspersons stop at the wait station and survey her tables from there. The manager/captain nearly runs over to her and actually tells her to walk around while she looks to see what needs to be done. That's the opposite of good dining room hospitality - you want to be unobtrusive, and if you can find a spot where you can see your station, and your guests can see you, you're golden to stay there.
I get asked four different times if I'm allergic to anything or have any dietary restrictions - once by the person I made the reservation with, once by each of the two waiters, and once by the sommelier. I also get the offer to explain how a tasting menu works from each of the three in the dining room, separately. I get asked by at least two people after every course if I liked it. They spend so much time circulating and let's call it "engaging" customers, that they miss stuff they really should be doing. The waiters twice set the wrong silverware for my table (and I'm not the only one), once bring a repeat of a dish I've already had, and the sommelier only manages to serve one of seven wines before the dish it is supposed to accompany arrives at the table - and twice, I'm more than halfway done with the dish before he does. They're not overworked here, again, fewer than 30 people in the room. They're just buzzing around inefficiently.
The food is not at all what Gualtieri used to do at Casa Umare. It's fiddly, fussy, "tweezer" food. It's pretty as all hell. But dish after dish is just kind of... good. There wasn't anything horribly wrong with any dish, but there just wasn't anything exciting, other than the visual. And the kitchen is agonizingly slow. An eight course menu - and that includes what is basically an amuse to start, and a "pre-dessert", so really, more like six courses, takes them over three hours to send out. I mean, thank god I could pull up an ebook on my phone to read. The four women at the table next to me flag down the manager as their main course is served and ask to be let off the hook for the two dessert courses, please just bring them the check and let them leave, they'll pay for everything. The table of two behind me are making fun of how slow it is, and how they wish they could be anywhere else by this point.
The wine... according to the menu, a tasting of the greatest hits of Luigi Bosca, including some of their reserve wines and their Gala line. And they all sounded like they would pair really well with the dishes they were designated to. Except the only Luigi Bosca wine served was the sparkling at the beginning. After that, things veered off, and the sommelier seemed to almost be serving random wines. The two tables closest to me got different wines than I did and than each other did, for almost every course. And when it came down to it, not one of the wine pairings worked with the substitutions. I asked him about it, especially given that we were talking some fairly significant price point differences with some of these wines (like hundreds of pesos less per bottle), and the response was, "it gets boring serving wine from the same vineyard all through the meal, so I thought I'd mix it up a bit". Yeah, umm, sounds more like a cost cutting move, and if I were the suspicious sort, I'd guess some of those were just sample or open bottles being finished off.
So all in all, unfortunately, this one's a pass for me. It just wasn't good enough to justify spending $75. And what a shame, because I used to really love Gualtieri's food at Casa Umare. read more