Taste is the trendy new restaurant situated off State Street in the heart of the bustling dirty commercial student-infested world near the U-M campus, right across from two other thriving, better establishments, Slurping Turtle, and Knight's, that run counter to the conventional student food preferences for speed and affordability. The food, such as it is, was good, unobjectionable, but the restaurant itself is pretentious, ungenerous, highly overpriced, noisy, has a small menu and a wildly inflated opinion of itself. The first thing the oversolicitous, chirpy waitress did was present a small lecture on how great the food there, and what a wonder the chef, was. Maybe there was no need to order it, I thought. Her pop-up reappearance throughout the meal was irritating. Taste makes it almost impossible to satisfy your hunger for under $40 per, not counting drinks. No dishes are reasonably priced. By not serving bread as a policy - or was it a political position? - ("We're not that kind of restaurant," we were told with chagrin by the waitress, obviously uncomfortable with our question), either you wait for the small entrees or are forced to order small, expensive appetizers. A few slices of crouton-sized grilled bread do miraculously appear if you order the cheese plate, but if you ask want more bread, if prompted by the waitress, don't be as surprised as we were when they charge you for it. Taking tackiness to a new level, we all felt. The dishes include lots of fish and seafood, and are mostly Asian-fusion concoctions served on large, oddly shaped plates that tend to dwarf the servings, as is so common nowadays in places where "plating" outclasses eating. The salads seemed fine.But a cooked vegetable entree smaller than a salad cost twice what the salad cost. No extras before, during or after dinner are offered diners. Lunch might have been a good accompaniment. A glass of mediocre wine was poured from a tiny carafe, and the martini was served in the smallest martini glass our much-traveled, world class martini-loving guest had ever seen (he has reputedly drunk 7442 martinis in the last 40 years). Taste, in short, offers you little but a taste of what it should be, and of what its chef could do with a larger edible inventory and a larger heart. There is certainly a small market for this kind of restaurant, as the clueless insatiable yuppie world of southeast Michigan regularly replenishes its ranks, and if any of its new members, probably out-of-towners, or locals unable or unwilling to garnish any restaurant with standards higher than window dressing, continue to return, like trout swimming upstream, Taste may be there longer than some of the many experiments that have graced, or disgraced, that location in the last 3 years, where finding a place to park can make any eating experience seem like desperately fine dining. read more