| rev:text
| - The kitchen here is impressive. Very impressive. The dishes are cleverly put together with fascinating combinations...but the focus is on being impressive rather than being delicious. Avenue B is a perfect example of why higher end fancy restaurants, once they get to a certain level of culinary accomplishment and achievement, tend to focus on lots of small courses in a meal. The first bite of everything was interesting (and impressive, as I may have mentioned), but I didn't really want a lot of anything once the novelty wore off.
The menu descriptions were also problematic--confusing and dishonest. The dishonest part is a little easier to explain: Avenue B is a BYOB and didn't disclose to me at any point until handing me the check that there was an 8 dollar corkage fee. I thought maybe I had missed it on the menu, but I checked later and didn't see anything (and even if it had been there, I agreed to have them open the bottle for me before I saw a menu). So then I figured, "Ah, must be on the website," so I went home and checked. Nope. The only mention of a corkage fee anywhere on the website (as of the time of this writing) is where they say there's a special Sunday dinner service with no corkage fee (though no mention of what the corkage fee usually is, and I hadn't read the "Sunday Dinner Service" section of the website in advance as I wasn't going on a Sunday). I'm not saying corkage fees are inherently wrong or dishonest, but I believe hidden fees--especially those much higher than one would normally expect--certainly are.
On the "confusing" end: When you're doing fancy and impressive things, clarity is important. And I'm not talking about using a fancy ingredient and not explaining what it is--people can ask or look that up on their phones. But when you're inventing your own terminology, you're putting up a barrier to clarity that isn't as easily overcome.
For example, the night I went, one of the item descriptions included chicken with a superscript 3 (a tiny 3 aligned to the top and immediately following the word chicken--if your browser is configured like mine, it looked like this: chicken³ ). My dining companion assumed it was a footnote and didn't bother to look into it any further, as often restaurants will footnote items and put health information in the footnote. I was a little more suspicious, as I hadn't noticed a 1 or 2 in superscript, and after further consideration I thought, "Ah, it's just them trying to be cute. Chicken to the third power...or chicken cubed...it's just chicken in cube forms." Both of us had come to a reasonable conclusion: a superscripted 3 commonly means either "third footnote" or "cubed." What it DOESN'T commonly mean, however, is "3 ways," and in this case, that's what it was, chicken 3 ways. Pretty much every other English-speaking restaurant on the planet writes out the number of ways they're doing an ingredient if that's the theme of the dish, but no, not Avenue B. My companion ordered it and wound up quite disappointed, when an accurate menu description would have easily and immediately helped her make a better choice (at no point did any member of the waitstaff explain what it was to us, either before or after ordering, though our waiter did explain a few other menu items which weren't nearly so poorly described).
They clearly have the talent in the kitchen to be a great restaurant, but seriously, get your priorities straight and get your act together.
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