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| - We decided on Chart House for our anniversary dinner, as we had been there before a couple of years prior and enjoyed that experience. The atmosphere is nice, the restaurant is quiet, and the ambience was appealing. Our experience this time was less than wonderful. The staff was great and service was very good but honestly the food quality was so-so given the expense. That is to say it was much what you would expect from a restaurant chain where food is drenched with butter and salt to give it flavor and you go home feeling bloated and disgusting from the meal. The appetizer (we had something with crab and shrimp, avocado and mango) was rather bland, really, given the appealing combination of ingredients. I would recommend something like fresh lemon or something to give it a tad more flavor, but it was at least fresh. My wife had a dish with scallops, shrimp and gnocchi and while it was flavorful, it was too rich and the flavor wasn't the sort of nuanced combination of delicious ingredients one would normally expect from a higher-end restaurant. The same was true for the herb-encrusted snapper I chose. The bed of sauce it lay in tasted like cream and butter and the side of spinach we had was the same way. I'm sure all told we had in excess of 10,000 calories between us and frankly, the food probably didn't taste all that different from something you'd get at Red Lobster, which we avoid like the plague. One with a refined palate would not count this choice among one's short list of places to go for food quality and next time we'll look elsewhere as for us the experience needs to be both culinary AND atmospheric if we're going to spend $175 for a meal, which is what our bill came to. It's hard enough to spend $45 for a typical $14 bottle of merlot without the food being at best, well, average chain restaurant fare.
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