NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 12:48:04 +0000 (UTC) To: [email removed],
"Thompson, Ron/Susan"
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After a lovely visit to Fallingwater, our party of 4 decided to have dinner at Chez Girard in Hopwood yesterday evening. We had been there a couple of times before when the original owner/chef was there and had been generally quite pleased with both the food and the service.
We left Fallingwater a little before 5 and arrived at the restaurant on route 40 just east of Uniontown about 5:30, the time of our reservation. (NOTE ON WHEELCHAIR ACCESS: since one of us uses a motorized wheelchair, we had called ahead to make sure that the restaurant was accessible. There is a ramp into the restaurant and once inside there is good access. No ADA bathrooms, however. BIG MINUS is that outside the restaurant there are lots of irregular slate paving stones, grass, and gravel -- a nightmare for any wheelchair user.)
Once in the restaurant, we noticed that we were the only party there. We were seated immediately by a waitress about whom there was nothing French. We were presented only with the prix fixe menu, but when one of asked, we were also given the a la carte menu. The prix fixe menu offers a 6-course meal for $40 with a number of choices offered with a $2-7 supplemental charge. In addition, there is a complimentary small starter dish (coucous salad) as the pre-first course.
I had a kir royale with a bit too much cassis. A bottle of B&G white burgundy and a glass of French merlot were adequate. Their wine list is pretty good; there whisk(e)y selection is fair to poor.
The food was truly wonderful. I chose a rock lobster salad appetizer over the soup of the day, a lobster bisque. Two of us had the special duck breast in green peppercorn sauce. Others had escargot followed by salmon, or the special turbot. For dessert we had rhubarb tart or a dense espresso chocolate cake.
Our two biggest disappointments were, first, that our server a) had no class, b) knew nothing about the choices of food on the menu (i.e., she hadn't sampled any of the dishes), and c) didn't appear to be very interested in what she was doing. At one point, one of asked for ground pepper on his salad (this was not offered spontaneously), and the waitress brought the pepper mill, gave it to him, and left -- we were all a bit shocked by her neglecting to grind it onto the salad. Our other disappointment was that the chef never came out to say hello and see if we were enjoying ourselves. This should not have been a problem for him considering that...
We were the only party in the restaurant from 5:30 to about 7:45.
Bottom line: great food -- good value prix fixe menue; mediocre service.
Jim and Linda GreenbergPennsylvania