Cafe Azure: opinions?

 Hi,

 This is not the Jay Gordon who bumbled in and make a fool of himself and
 pissed off mom and dad and everyone else.  This is a totally different
 guy writing now.  That guy is now writing copy for McDonald's menus.

 MY question is, what do people think of Cafe Azure?  I just went, and
 while it had its good points, my 'good value' standard was not met.

 First off however, the service was excellent -- I rarely eat in places
 which have nine different people serving you, and that was at least a
 nice touch.  And not at all obsequious.

 The food, of which I did not have a whole lot (I chose soup and entree
 only), was fairly tasty, but not worth the money.  I got the carrot soup
 with ginger and for the entree, the crevettes et autre stuff, i can't
 remember the whole title.  The soup was bizarre -- I expected something
 kind of spicy sweet, but the flavor was actually almost impossible to
 pin down.  It -had- a flavor, and it wasn't exactly bad, but it wasn't
 tasty either.  Maybe my taste buds were out of whack, or maybe the
 original carrots were kind of bitter.  Either way, the soup was a bust.

 The entree was all right.  It included 5 more or less juicy shrimp; a
 little lump of salad made of orange, artichokes, pickled pepper, and
 onion, and maybe a couple other things; several extremely thin slices of
 eggplant lightly grilled; and finally another lump of some kind of
 tomato mush with capers.  None of these components was bad -- in fact,
 most were tasty.  But the salady stuff was kind of oily, almost like an
 antipast(i/o?), which may have been intended -- I'm not in the know
 French cuisine-wise.  This rendered the eggplant a bit too soft and
 oily.  The shrimp were nice, but not really integrated will.  Maybe
 again this is the point -- "a pile of this, a row of those, and shuffle
 in a few slices of these."

 Overall, this was not a bad meal.  But considering the bread was pretty
 lame (and got stale within minutes), my NINETEEN-FIFTY tab was a little
 hard to swallow (this didn't include the soup).  (One quick side note on
 the bread -- a kid serves each slice individually with tongs.  Maybe
 this is protocol, but it struck me as intensely silly.)

 My girlfriend (yes, I have friends!) enjoyed hers, the vegetable hot
 pot, but she just had oral surgery & couldn't really get into the
 cauliflower on the side (so I can't comment on their vegetable steaming
 skill).

 Is mine a common experience at this place?  Oh yeah, I sought it ought
 because we had a coupon, without which our total tab including tip would
 have just hit 50 bucks -- definitely too much.

 - Jay