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| - After a few incredible fine-dining meals at other restaurants, I had commented to my wife that I was eager to try other fine-dining places. So, for my birthday, she decided to take me to Harvest. I was excited to try something new. Unfortunately, there's no way to describe the meal other than overpriced and extremely underwhelming.
Things got off to a bad start as soon as we were seated. The hostess put us at a table where my wife had to sit on a long, shared bench running the length of the wall. This is a fine arrangement for a casual place, but at a more upscale place, I expect some privacy and not to have to share a bench seat with loud people on either side.
Our waitress gave us the menus; I was extremely underwhelmed. None of the dishes on offer seemed particularly exciting or innovative to me.
We ordered all of our courses at once: small plates to start with and an entree for each of us, plus a cheese plate. We ordered the cheese at the same time as the rest of our food as directed by the menu.
Then we waited. And kept waiting.
Eventually, someone brought us our amuse-bouche. It was described as a cool watermelon soup with fresh-cracked black pepper. It was actually watermelon juice with what looked like McCormick's-level preground pepper. We were underwhelmed.
About forty minutes after we first sat down, our small plates came out. We hadn't even received our table bread at this point. To be fair, out waitress had apologized and given me a free vodka on the rocks by this point, as well as explained that the kitchen was backed up because of a large party in the other room. Still, forty minutes seems like way too long to wait.
The dishes themselves were OK. Our buckwheat ramen was so-so. The pork pate was reminiscent of cat food. The French fries with horseradish aioli were good, but how could they not be? They're French fries. The foie gras was delicious. The table bread--which did finally arrive--was also delicious.
Our entrees--which arrived only after another long wait--weren't actively bad, but they were pretty "meh" at best.
My wife ordered the gnocchi. It was OK, but the flavor of bell pepper was overwhelming in the worst way.
I ordered the hanger steak. I've seen people raving about it on here, which I simply don't understand. My meat was tender and cooked properly, but it was devoid of flavor. The entire plate was just bland. The potato salad was stringy and off-putting, and the braised leeks were just unusual.
We were given dessert options. By this point we were ready to leave, but it was my birthday, so I figured we should give it a shot. We ordered two desserts, an empanada and a chocolate cremieux. The chocolate pudding--that's really all it was--was good. The empanada was unimpressive.
We never got our cheese plate, and we chose to just get the meal over with rather than say anything about it. When we got our bill, though, we realized that we'd been charged for the cheese plate. My wife brought this to the server's attention. She apologized, corrected our bill, explained that the cheese plate had been prepared, and offered it to us for free. We declined and left.
So, to sum up, our Harvest experience was so bad that even the offer of free cheese wasn't enough to keep us there. If you want fine dining in Madison, go to L'Etoile. It's twice as expensive, but it's four times the experience.
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