| rev:text
| - Disappointing. My husband and I enjoy fine dining -- whether it's featuring unique dishes and presentations or simple cuisine with fine ingredients and great execution. We were therefore excited to try Heirloom during restaurant week.
Our experience was underwhelming. First the food. Although the menu is interesting and the ingredients seem to be top-notch quality, the execution left much to be desired. Some examples:
1. Beet and butter lettuce salad with chevre and black walnuts: unless the chef meant "beet greens," there were absolutely no beets in the salad. The chevre was a single, miniscule morsel, no bigger than the tip of a pinkie finger and the black walnuts came in the form of ground dust on top of a couple of lettuce leaves (no discernible flavor). On the plus side: greens were fresh and delicious...the vinaigrette was lovely.
2. Chicken and dumplings: although the gravy was savory and rich, the dumplings had a peculiar crunchy interior (?). If this was part of the chef's plan, we probably should have been warned when the server was describing all the ingredients and their sources. (My husband and I enjoyed the explanations -- but a fellow diner found them pretentious and tedious).
3. Crab cakes, sumac rice, and confit of broccoli rabe: portion was generous. At least one of our crab cakes wasn't "browned," it was burnt on the outside. The sumac rice was crunchy on the inside (not al dente as one would expect from risotto, but noisily crunchy - undercooked?)
. When I've had vegetables confit, they've usually been poached in oil to give them a silky texture. I'm not sure I saw any broccoli rabe (a turnip-like green) on my plate...there was broccoli which appeared to have been steamed and given a quick char on the grill (nothing wrong with the veggies, just not what was advertised).
4. Desserts: disaster! The smashed cheesecake looked like a ball of cream cheese that had been covered with graham cracker crumbs; it tasted like a ball of slightly sweetened cream cheese that had been covered with graham cracker crumbs. The apple cake was cloyingly sweet -- and the apples had their peels on (I know, some trendy desserts feature the peel). For us, the peels gave the dessert an unpleasant and unfinished texture. The vegan chocolate cake was dry.
Other considerations:
Some find the atmosphere cozy and charming. We found it too dim - bordering on depressing (but kudos to them...it was not pretentious!).
Service was spotty...sometimes attentive, other times bordering on rude. Example: One diner, who didn't care for her dessert, asked if she could have one of the vegan peanut butter truffles that had just been given to a vegan at the table. The server curtly said: "We don't have those here." and promptly turned on her heel. Yikes! We heard another diner (at another table) being told that she shouldn't take her crabcake home because it wouldn't be good the next day...huh? Maybe not optimal, but we've taken plenty of crabcakes home from restaurants and found they were perfectly fine a day later. It really struck us (rightly or wrongly) that the server just didn't want to be bothered.
Bottom line: there's nothing horribly wrong at Heirloom (hence the 2 star review which stands for "I've experienced better") but on the night we dined there was nothing special.
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