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| - I hate giving restaurants bad reviews based on one experience, but on the particular day i went Halcyon earned a rating of "I've experienced better."
The restaurant is located in the Mint Museum Uptown building, and the interior is beautiful. Ridiculously high ceiling, beautiful chairs and tables, huge windows. The prices on the interesting menu reflect all of this. Unfortunately the quality of the food itself did not justify the price.
I decided to order a cocktail and had to ask my waiter what happened to it when our food came before it. My friend had the trout salad, which we both thought needed something acidic to brighten it up. I had the elevated BLT: pork belly, lettuce, and fried green tomatoes with pimento cheese on a thick slice of brioche. I was surprised when it came out that it was served open faced rather than as a sandwich and this made it difficult to eat because it was hard to get all of the components together on a single fork. The brioche itself was cut so thick that I would have trouble fitting that alone in my mouth. But that was the least of my problems. One of the three pieces of pork was dramatically overcooked. Clearly and obviously so. I was shocked that the chef would let it out of the kitchen on an open faced sandwich where it was just staring at me. I asked the waiter to get a replacement and he said he would gladly take care of it. As I was waiting, I found a hair in my cheese. No big deal for me actually, but on top of everything else it just continued the downward spiral. To their credit, a replacement was brought out with what had to be the biggest piece of pork belly in the restaurant on it. And the manager brought the dish out and assured me that the dish would be comped. Kudos for that, but the whole dish was ill-conceived and poorly executed.
Sadly, my noontime cocktail was the highlight of my meal at Halcyon. "Some Pig" = Benton's Bacon Fat-Washed Maker's 46. Orange Bitters. Maple Syrup. Kosher Salt. For $13 it had better be good, and it was.
A final note: despite the beautiful setting, the toilet in the bathroom was disgusting. Since I at before noon on Saturday, it had clearly not been cleaned from the night before, though someone had obviously replenished the paper towels in there.
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