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| - Whelp.
That didn't go well.
I've been to the Wise several times before and I know folks will give me a hard time for not writing about the more positive experiences I've had there. But in truth, the service, cocktails and food have never really blown me away, and now tonight (after probably the worst experience I've had there) I feel like it's time I come clean Madison.
I've never understood the greeting/seating situation. I understand it's a hotel lobby restaurant, informal in nature, but we stood for about 5 minutes tonight watching staffers pass us by before a bartender finally greeted us and told us to take a seat anywhere. In my opinion 5 minutes is 5 minutes too long to wait to acknowledge people who are about to spend money at your establishment.
It got worse.
Apparently they ran out of grapefruit juice and instead of asking the person I was dining with whether or not he wanted something else to drink as they couldn't make the cocktail he requested, they simply substituted cranberry juice. I don't feel like I need to expand but DO feel like anytime I run out of anything while cooking or preparing a libation, I will forever just add cranberry juice.
The red spread which I've had multiple times lacked flavor. Like... any flavor. It tasted like cold red paste. Not salty paste that you ate when you were a kid. Flavorless paste.
The meatloaf slider was ok, probably the highlight of our night, but the evening was so dismal that this highlight was more of a fading flicker.
The "popped ravioli" is where we lost it and felt cheated out of any sort of decent experience, cheated out of $14. I didn't really understand the dish as written on the menu. What arrived was a weird cross between a lasagna noodle and papardelle. Apparently "popped" ravioli means ravioli that hasn't been cut, squared, filled, folded... anything really. It's pasta with the insides that act more like a sauce than a filling. This dish would be better called "lazy man's ravioli," or just "pasta and sauce" than popped ravioli which sounds mildly interesting. Do I sound crabby? I am. Am I being fair? I am. Because this like the red spread lacked any sort of flavor. The dish was supposed to have fire roasted eggplant and garlic and I only know that because I just looked at the menu online. You'd have no idea otherwise. The pasta dough needs to be rolled out flatter before it's cut, the noodles need more salt in the water, the sauce slash filling slash stuff that popped out needs anything... like vegetables, spice, cream, chicken broth... something, and the entire dish needs an anchor. It was disappointing and insanely priced given the fact that it doesn't have a protein.
The most redeeming part of the evening was our server who admittedly wasn't great at his job, but he was trying. More than I can say about the rest of the experience.
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