| rev:text
| - Mediocre, at best.
Came here for their holiday/Christmas eve dinner (yes, this review is FRESH). Although I've seen some mixed reviews about this newly opened restaurant, I decided to come here to try for myself. Was I disappointed? In some ways. Would I return? Read on.
We arrived early for our reservation. The manager (I think it was the manager) was courteous and said our table was not ready yet, which was fine, and said we can sit and wait for a bit. He suggested we can sit by the bar and wait since sitting by the door might be a bit cold. That was quite nice of him, I thought. I then asked him whether we could get a seat upstairs; he said he'll definitely try should a table become available at the time, but if not we'll have to sit on the main floor. And when the time came, we sat downstairs by the window, which was okay since we could look out at the falling snow.
Onto the food first. The menu was set, similar to Winterlicious, except the price point was a bit higher. For appetizers, the salmon tartare tasted fresh, but a bit too sour for my liking. The colours were pretty nice and vibrant. The other app: carrots and beets were just a bit on the small side, otherwise things were fine there. The truffle pizza was pretty good; it would've tasted better if it was a bit warmer. The second dish: scallops, were cooked nicely; not over cooked at all. The sauce also gave it a nice finish. Onto the mains: steak frites - the steak was quite tender to my surprise. Not much effort was needed to chew it at all. We upgraded the fries to truffle fries, which we probably could've passed. The fries on its own did have nice flavours, though. The black cod by far was my favourite dish of the night. The texture was perfect; nice and tender. And, it carried a light sweetness to it. For dessert it was either coconut creme brulee or mascarpone cheesecake. The creme brulee was normal, nothing out of the ordinary. The 'cheesecake' surprised me (see photo), but it still tasted good, I was just expecting an actual piece of cake. The presentations for all the dishes were pretty nice.
What disappointed me the most was probably the service. To me, even if the food at a restaurant isn't as great, as long as the service is amicable, it makes up for the food that much more. Now, I can openly say I am less than a fan of the assistant manager here (she is introduced on the restaurant's IG in case you're wondering). I don't think I've ever received a borderline cut eye from an employee of an upscale restaurant before. But, I guess there's a first for everything *shrugs. When I made the reservation 2 weeks ago, I asked what they usually do if there's a birthday person at the table. They said they can offer a dessert with 'happy birthday' written on it and such, and proceeded to input that into the system. Fast forward to this morning, I called to double check they had that 'note' in their system and they said yes. You probably see where I'm getting at here. Fast forward some more to when our bill came (surprise, surprise) no birthday whatever was given, which wasn't the real issue. We paid our bill, then I asked the AM if there's anything they do for birthday guests. She said that would need to be requested at the time I made my reservation. I said I know... because I did that twice. She paused... then gave me a less than pleasant expression and said 'We'll handle it'. We waited and discussed among ourselves whether we should wait, or just leave it at that since she didn't seem too pleased about it. But, just when we were getting up to leave, the dessert came (no congratulatory from the AM of course). Having studied hospitality myself, customer service is the number one thing in this industry. It was unfortunate she didn't understand that. Just to round things off, our server of the night (not sure what her name was) was very nice :)
Very, very mixed feelings about this restaurant. It's a bit more than likely I won't be returning... at least not until the AM understands what 'customer service' is :)
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