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| - First, the with positives. Service was fine. Server was pleasant, attentive and offered to resolve the issues associated with the food. Creamed Corn was good with fresh corn and good blend of peppers and spice. It was a tad cornstarchy though. Place was pretty full for reasons I will never understand.
Then, came the food. I root for restaurants. I really do. Especially when someone opens a new restaurant close to my house, I especially want it to be good. When we heard that Chef Bret from Becker's was behind the stoves, we were especially optimistic having been to Becker's dozens of times as a Westside alternative to DelFrisco's, N9ne, Ruth's Chris, or Prime. So we tried Embers a couple weeks after they opened and ordered a myriad of menu selections only to have various combinations of Sysco lettuce and vegetables show up with stale bread and temperatures all over the board.
We chalked it up to opening jitters. Tonight, we elected to go back because we heard that they had revamped the menu and the food. Oh my god. We ordered the Eggplant and fresh mozzerella melt ($8.00) for an appetizer. It arrived promptly and was a crusty dry tasteless piece of toast with an ultra-thin tasteless sliver of what appeared to be eggplant under a half-dollar piece of lukewarm cheap mozzerella. It was served on a bed of Sysco generic mixed greens with generic diced tomatoes. It was drizzled with a balsamic vinegar reduction which was barely noticable but it was the highlight of the awful awful tasteless dish.
The Mrs. ordered the chicken cobb salad ($12.00) and I ordered the 12 oz., New York. ($32.00) The chicken cobb was a serving plate of iceberg lettuce that looked like they just dumped a bag of iceberg lettuce from Von's onto a plate complete with some of the core. The chicken on it was moist but it was unable to save the salad.
Then came the 12 oz. New York. I have eaten probably 50 steaks at restaurants in the past year, some of which at restaurants I would never bring a date. Some of them at bars and truck-stoppy places where you have no business ordering a steak. This was the worst steak I have had in several years. It was ordered medium rare. It came as a grey slab of meat with a couple of criss-cross marks in it which looked like they were colored on it.
I gave it a try to see perhaps if the taste was better than the microwave looking grey slab of putrid looking garbage that was staring at me from the plate. It was as gross as it looked. I thought it had to be a mistake, because I could not imagine that Applebee's or Chili's or Outback puts out anything quite as awful as this mess.
I asked the server whether all the steaks look like this, and whether they are cooked like this. She replied that she would be happy to take it to the back and char it more for me. I passed as that would just mean that they would cook it way past medium rare as I ordered it and they would end up giving me a medium well steak which would be as bad as the thing on the plate. I tried to stomach a couple of bites, and the steak, rather than a meaty salty piece of steak, tasted like lemon. I don't get it.
Then some sort of manager type guy came up and stated that the steak was cooked over redwood in a broiler of something. He further stated that told the chef that they were, from now on, going to char their steaks more. Thanks. That made me feel a lot better that I, after 9 months of being open, told them that they were cooking steaks that looked like they were microwaved.
They charged me for everything even though we only ate 1/2 of the eggplant garbage and half the "steak". I'm not looking for a free dinner.
In fact, if I was given a $1000.00 gift certificate to Embers, I would sell it for $200.00 and take the cash to any other restaurant in Boca Park area including, Flemming's, Roy's, Cheesecake Factory, Kona Grill, Applebees, Three Angry Wives, or Roberto's at Fabulous Freddy's Car Wash across the street.
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