| rev:text
| - A lot can happen in year, particularly for The Living Room.
When Summerlicious 2015 was announced, I remembered with daydreamy awe, the gastronomic wonder my partner and his family devoured last year. For the record, I've always been leery of hotel restaurants as the fare, in my opinion, is predictably sub-par. Last year, The Living Room was the exception. This year, it was sadly the rule.
The menu is marketing brilliance at it's best. The ingredients, the flavours...all fetchingly delicious. BUT, what's with all the deep frying? Ok, so I ordered the calamari ring ("Ring of Calamari") to start and ok, maybe I should have known that it would be served battered and deep fried even though there was no mention of it, but where in the next description does it suggest that battered and deep fried avocado would be served up?
Black Squid Aioli, Soy Salmon Tartare
Cucumber and Avocado Wasabi
Deep fried avocado is like something a food stand at the CNE would dream up to serve something "healthy".
For the main, I ordered the dry-aged rib eye with avocado butter sauce, grilled corn and red potato summer salad. Mmmm, sounds good, right? Unfortunately, not. The potato salad was probably the worst I ever had. I think the potato was cubed and roasted and then left in the fridge uncovered to dry out before dressing. The rib eye was undercooked for medium and in hindsight, I should have sent it back, but was disheartened.
Still, in an effort to cheer to up, I told my partner that dessert would redeem. Again, unfortunately not. I ordered the gorgonzola cheese cake and rhubarb compote thinking that the gorgonzola would be delicately infused in the cheesecake, but no, it was planted on top with metallic decorative balls that parents buy when they're baking cupcakes with their children. My partner had the avocado chocolate mousse and it was not only adorned the same decorative balls, but it also looked and tasted like it was in the fridge for some time uncovered.
Service was bewildering. We were served water shortly after we were we seated and we later ordered a bottle of sparkling water. They brought another pair of glasses, but the same as the water glasses. It was clearly confusing as we often had to stop them from pouring sparkling into the regular. I'm no waitress, but how about using different glasses?
When our dinner plates were cleared, we were asked the usual, "how was it?" I lamely replied, "alright", and the response I received was "perfect."
I never thought I'd slam a restaurant, but I'm actually resentful that we paid $45 each for this dinner. My partner imagined it could be meal served up in a nursing home and I was left thinking how amazingly good the frozen pizzas I recently discovered from Costco are.
So sad as it's a beautiful restaurant with a stunning bar.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)