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| - What a sub-par dining experience! I bought my husband a $100 gift card to the Melting Pot for his last birthday; we love fondue and make it frequently at home, but it's always a lot of work, and I thought it would be fun to sit back and let someone else stir the pot, if you will. Well, 2 valuable Friday-night hours and $150 (including the gift card) later, I wished we had stayed at home and created shredded mountains of Gruyere and Fontina ourselves. We selected the "Perfect Night Out" (ha!) menu, which allowed you to choose a cheese fondue, a salad, types of meat, style of broth fondue (for cooking the meat) and a dessert fondue. We both had dirty martinis with Absolut, which were $8.50 - so overpriced. We could have gotten Gray Goose martinis for that price elsewhere.
Anyway, the cheese fondue fixings arrived, and our server (who was really, really nice and pretty much the only good thing about our dining experience) threw them all in the pot, gave them a quick stir, and Voila!, the worst fondue ever was born. It tasted like melted cheddar, and that's it! There was no complexity or richness at all. The bread cubes for dipping were stale, the mixed veggies just contained cauliflower and baby carrots. The Granny Smith apples were decent, but we finished the first course totally unimpressed (and already staring at our watches!). Next up were the salads. They may have been the worst salads we've ever had. The mushroom spinach salad was drenched in jaw-numbingly sweet dressing, and the Caesar salad dressing was sweet too (?!).
At this point, the meat course arrived, and our server mixed up the "Coq Au Vin" broth (this was an $8 upgrade from the regular bouillon broth), dumping an entire carafe of burgundy wine into the fondue pot. After we began eating this course, my husband correctly pointed out that that was wine we could have drunk instead of sending to a flavorless fate in that pot, and I wholeheartedly agree. The meat was either really overseasoned or underseasoned - as an example, the sirloin cubes were coated in stale, dry herbs, but the chicken, which was supposed to have a vanilla essence, tasted just like dr y chicken. To be fair, the shrimp and lobster tail were decent, but I would have rather gone to Red Lobster and had a lifetime supply of shrimp and lobster tail for much less than we paid for this meal. The dipping sauces that came with this course were also confusing - there were like 8 of them, and except for the melted herb butter, they all tasted totally unappealing. The teriyaki glaze and sweet and sour were the worst - they reminded me of sauces that come on a Yoshinoya rice bowl.
Whew, ok, so at this point, we were ready to just get the check and leave before dessert. I am glad that we decided to stick around, since the dessert was the only good part of the meal. We ordered the dark chocolate and Disaronno Amaretto fondue, and we really enjoyed the bananas, rice krispie treats, and strawberries coated with the perfectly melted sauce. The coated marshmellows were strange, though, and we left them on the plate. Based on the taste, quality, and value of this food, I wanted to give this place one star. The incredibly attentive service (don't kill the messenger or, in this case, the deliverer, right?) and dessert made me throw a star back on. If you have $150 to blow, you could have a great meal at Durant's or Elements (or a FEAST at tons of other places); why spend it on an over-hyped and flavorless Melting Pot dinner?
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