Extremely mediocre french food at extremely high prices. I cannot in good faith recommend this spot for anyone looking for authentic french fare.
The only redeeming quality about this place is the ambience. Very cool looking restaurant and a nice aesthetic. High ceilings. Long bar. The bar was quite empty for a weeknight making it feel a little bit awkward to sit there. The room was very hot. It was understandably a hot day, but the inside was still approaching 80 degrees. Guests were fanning themselves with menus and I was wiping sweat from my brow while eating. This was the start of an uncomfortable meal.
i was offered an amuse bouche after placing my order for a french onion soup and beef bourguignon. The bite was a little cheese puff, I would describe it as choux pastry with a thick mornay sauce. The bite was good, though I found it to be more disappointing after reading other reviews mentioning the same going back 2 years. Would be nice to see some creativity and change of pace here.
The french onion soup was $22. Yes I knowingly chose to order this even given the price, but I thought there must be something insanely special about this soup to justify this price. This is a quality $10 french onion soup, but nothing more, to charge this much is ridiculous. I'll break down the points where the cost doesn't add up.
1. The cheese on top, very mild in flavor, other than texture, there's not much going on here. This should have been some remarkably high quality imported gruyere with an unmatched standout nutty creaminess. 2. The crostini floating in this soup had a nice crispiness, but were actually mildly burnt. These are matter of fact very easy to burn, but I would expect a restaurant to not use burnt food, again consider this price. So every bite was interspersed with a charred bitterness. The flavor of the bread itself was also lacking, nothing but texture here and nothing more. Should be a savory homemade bread at this cost. 3. The soup flavor itself, decent, sweet from the onions, mildly beefy, insanely salty. The waitress told me this was made with veal stock and I assumed this would be a rich stock prepared the night before, but this tasted like typical grocery store boxed stock boiled down to thicken it and condense the flavor which then made it way too salty. I can and have made much better french onion soups at home, and I'm still annoyed at the price I paid for such a mediocre rendition.
The beef bourguignon was by and large the most disappointing entree though. This was not even close to being made properly and you can tell easily from the photo. It's supposed to be made with wine from Burgundy, I did not taste even a hint of wine here. I genuinely do not believe they even used any. Looking at other photos, I see some peoples look completely different with a more proper color and thickness. I don't know if there are different chefs preparing this, or if they've degraded the quality, but the change in consistency is astounding.
The sauce was a thin beef stock, and probably 30% fat/oil floating on top. Again look at the photo, serving a dish with this much grease floating on top is embarrassing. This should have been a rich demi-glace. For $45 there's no justification for serving a glorified pot roast unless you went through the painstaking effort for a homemade demi-glace, boiling and reducing stock down until you have enough natural gelatin to thicken the sauce. It was not even strained and had large bits of rosemary floating in it which is not palatable to eat in such a large piece.
The beef was cooked well and was tender, but dry. It had no wine flavor and should have been coated in what is essentially a wine gravy rather than the thin soup presented. It was challenging to even eat with a fork because the amount of liquid dripping off everything rather than coating it as a sauce. The potatoes, pearl onions, and carrots, were cooked well.
Midway through this dish my stomach really started to hurt and it continued to hurt for about the next 8 hours. I believe it was just so greasy it was giving me indigestion.
I think these two dishes as presented to me are truly an embarrassment to french cuisine. I do not believe the beef was actually braised in wine. I think all the ingredients were cooked separately, assembled into a bowl, and a ladle off the top of a stock pot was poured on and that was it. I don't understand the consistency problem, but based on the photos I could believe others have received better preparations. The price is too high to ever risk trying it again, and I would recommend to spend your money elsewhere. read more