rev:text
| - Friends of ours invited us to meet them at this restaurant to celebrate a birthday. Never having been there, I checked out their website, and found that it is one of a (small) chain of restaurants based in Chicago. The menu looked interesting, and I tentatively chose an entree (Clams and Mussels alla Uncle Roy). Upon arriving at the restaurant, I discovered that that dish was not on the menu. I had chosen it because it was not tomato sauce or cream based. The actual menu only has such main dishes. In any case, I asked the waiter about the appetizer of "creamy mariniere" musselson the menu. He didn't know, or couldn't explain, what "mariniere" meant. I guessed it was the standard dish, but boy was I wrong. The mussels, very overcooked and chewy, came with a heavy tasteless cream sauce. My main dish, the "pescatore" came with exactly the same cream sauce. And the mussels were likewise overcooked, but the clams were cooked so much that they were simply paste. Inedible. The wine we chose, Penfold's Bin #2 Syrah-Mourvèdre (a $10 bottle in the supermarkets), was priced at $30, an exhorbitant markup. Nothing to recommend this restaurant -- oh, and did I mention the gruff and unhelpful waiter?
|