rev:text
| - Let me start out by saying that the service was great. The restaurant was packed and our server, Amanda, was helpful, friendly and quick, especially since she was probably slammed with tables. My complaint is with the food.
I got the winterlicious menu. Not because I wanted a deal but because I'm vegetarian and I didn't feel like eating mac and cheese (their veg option on the regular menu). The Gem Lettuce and Tuscan Kale Salad with a Mushroom Barley Risotto sounded like a nice meal. But when the salad arrived, I knew I'd made a terrible mistake. It was a romaine salad with three tiny pieces of kale. There was a blob of store-bought creamy blue cheese dressing on top, and spiralized carrots with a few nuts. It looked like a cafeteria salad you'd find in a nursing home. It looked like the sad salad you'd make yourself on diet day, the one you eat grudgingly. It was definitely not a kale salad!
Then came the mains. If you're going to put something unusual on the menu--mushroom barley risotto, in this case--one would assume you've come up with a tasty recipe. But this was disgusting. The only flavour in the dish came from the sparse blobs of cheese, which I finished in three bites. The barley "risotto" was slimy and flavourless. The mushrooms (button mushrooms, nothing fancy) were slimy and flavourless. They must have tried to add the crunch with the vegetable chips they put on top, but there was no saving this pile of vomit (yeah, honestly, it looked like and had the consistency of vomit). I ate the chips. So thanks, O&B, for a dinner of six chips.
My tablemates didn't fare that much better. The nice-looking tart my boyfriend got as an app (again on the winterlicious menu) was cold. Who serves a cold roasted vegetable tart? And the lettuce on my mother's burger--this one from the regular menu--was wilted and rusted.
The only good thing about the winterlicious menu was the banana tarte tatin, the only dessert made in-house, and I'm so thankful our server recommended it. The rest was the worst meal I have ever eaten in a café, diner, restaurant...really, the worst. I'll never go there again.
|