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| - All the other Yelp reviews from this summer tell me that our experience was unusual, so I'm writing this to help you avoid our mistakes. We may be the only couple in North America for whom Le Filet was a bust.
We went at 7 on a Friday night in August. The atmosphere felt weird--the servers were awkward, and seemed uncomfortable around us. My French is awful and so we had to speak in English, which didn't help.
The food was what shocked me. One dish--the scallop and avocado salad--was wonderful in all the ways we expected: fresh, clever, technical, and delicious. Everything else tasted burnt, flavorless, or worse.
If I have one piece of advice to offer, it is this: do not order the onion rings. I loved seeing them on the menu, witty evidence that Le Filet does not take itself too seriously. Our server said they were on the menu because they were really quite good, so I went for it. They were burned, and while that may have been it they tasted so bad I wondered if there was some other problem as well. Stale batter? Skunky oil? We saw other folks leaving their onion rings uneaten--why didn't someone in the kitchen notice the problem?
The main courses were our main disappointments. The salmon was texturally perfect: a melting, almost jellied consistency that was a pleasure to eat. The flavor, though, was wrong: everything would be fine for a couple bites, but then a bitter, charred taste would overwhelm anything you would want in your mouth. The octopus was flavorless except for an aftertaste of char.
Our experience is clearly an outlier, and you would probably be right to dismiss it as unlikely to happen to you, but we felt so burned by the experience that if we ever get to visit Montreal again (and I hope we do!) we wouldn't even consider giving Le Filet another chance.
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