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| - I went to Ken Stewart's last weekend for dinner with my parents. I was impressed with the location, and like that this new construction is revitalizing the area.
The interior of the restaurant is sleek and modern, with a cool "downtown loft" ambience. The restaurant itself was beautiful and clean, and they even offered mouthwash in the bathroom. The service here is good: our waiter was very polite, friendly, and knowledgable about the food. He was also more than willing to answer questions and make recommendations.
My main disappointment with Ken Stewart's is the mismatch between the premium food prices and the average quality dishes. Let me explain:
When we received the menu, I was initially struck by how expensive everything on the menu was. This restaurant has one of the highest price points I've seen in Cleveland! For example, the entrees were generally between $35 and $50, with the highest price being $145! With prices like that, you would expect the food to be both outstanding and flawless. However, in my experience, this was not so. As an appetizer, we shared an order of fried calamari and edamame hummus. Both were tasty, nothing special. They offered us house-made dinner rolls, which were again average.
Then we got our entrees. The three of us ordered fish dishes. When they came out, we could tell that our fish was definitely fresh. But there were notable problems with the execution of the dishes. I ordered seared tuna, rare. My tuna was a bit overcooked, probably about medium. It was served on top of edamame rice, which was average. But this dish had a huge problem: it was covered with quite a large amount of miso paste as well as a miso-soy reduction, both of which were incredibly salty! Of course I understand that a person's salt tolerance varies; however, this was at an inedible level! This seems like an egregious error for any dish, and especially one that costs $43! I wiped it off and continued eating. Besides this, my mother ordered the bronzino, which was a bit overcooked and crumbly, but tasted pretty good. My father ordered the whole yellowtail snapper, which was the best dish of the night. It was very fresh and lightly fried. It was laying in ponzu sauce, which my father found to be on the salty side too (but was nothing compared to the tuna!). Again, neither of these two dishes were above average in creativity or taste, which is disappointing for dishes that costed $38 and $42. Lastly, we ordered a side of truffle fries to share. The fries had a nice crispy texture, but they were so overly greasy that we could not eat them. I suspect that they either didn't drain the fries, or poured an excessive amount of truffle oil on top. Whatever it was, our basket returned looking like it hadn't been touched.
If the prices here weren't so high, maybe I wouldn't have been so bothered by those errors, and maybe my hopes for outstanding food would not have been so elevated. I resist comparing cities, but having lived in Chicago for four years, I found prices that high only in Micheline-stared restaurants, so I was expecting more from Ken Stewart.
That being said, I really hope that was an "off" night, and I would be willing to give it another try.
My conclusion is that Ken Stewart should lower its price point or improve its food quality so that it can become a Cleveland standout!
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