NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2001 21:52:55 PST
Organization: Excite@Home - The Leader in Broadband http://home.com/faster Xref: usenet.INS.cwru.edu dc.dining:20260
I just got back from a rather miserable dinner at Le
Relais. Three friends and I decided to go and try the "bar menu" (appetizer, entree, cheese course, dessert, and a glass of wine for $24) that Tom Sietsema recommended this week. Even though the bar menu requires sitting at the bar, and I had never heard of a restaurant that takes reservations for seats near the bar, we called just to see if they would. The person who answered the phone claimed that not only did they take them, but that they were "highly recommended", so we made one, and showed up about five minutes early for it. It turns out, however, that someone had gotten confused, and reserved us a table in the main dining room. We waited in the lobby for about fifteen minutes for a bar table, (the "bar" is a basically a separate, smaller, dining room that happens to contain a bar in it), and then asked if we could be seated in the main dining room and still order from the bar menu; another fifteen minutes later, we were finally told that no, that wouldn't be possible.
At this point we were moved from the lobby to the bar,
where we stood next to an empty table that, another fifteen minutes later, was bussed and set up for us to use. Or rather, for us to sit at and wait. And wait. And wait. Somewhere in there, we got some water, and our order was taken. And then we waited, and waited, while a couple who was seated shortly after us placed their order, and got their first course of soup served almost immediately. We twice had to ask for refills of our water, and it was only after a "bread and water" joke to one of the waitstaff that we even got some bread and butter to tide us over. Note that the bread and water joke was made as a fairly pointed reminder that we still hadn't received even our soup course; the waiters were fairly good at getting us some bread, but didn't make any attempt to explain the delay, which continued for a while longer.
By this point, we were less than happy, so when the manager
walked by next, we flagged him down and asked why it was taking so long to ladle out four bowls of soup, especially since others had had theirs served so quickly. His answer was that Yannick Cam was working as the guest chef in the kitchen, and that if he said anything to Yannick he would be yelled at, so he didn't want to say anything. He took one look at our faces, and suddenly apologized and ran into the kitchen. Five minutes later, we were presented with an "appeasement" gift of a fried salmon croquette. It was pretty mediocre (we were probably spoiled by the croquetas at Taberna del Alabardero last month...), but it at least showed an effort to make up for offering us quite possibly the worst excuse for bad service that I have ever heard, so we tried to not be too grumpy for the rest of the meal. The soups _did_ arrive soon thereafter, and they, too, were nothing special. Two of us had the Onion Soup Lyonnaise, and two had the potato leek soup; the latter was very good, but the former was fairly unimpressive--the broth wasn't bad, but the crouton and cheese were flavorless.
And as soon as the soups arrived, the miserable service
resumed. I'm not going to continue with the play-by-play of interminable waiting--suffice to say that we didn't leave until just after 11pm, after having been seated for two and a half hours, and despite having pointed out to multiple people that we were unhappy with the speed of our service (and cancelling plans to go see a movie afterwards); that wouldn't have been too bad, had the food been anything to write home about. It wasn't, unfortunately.
For our entrees, two of us got the steak frites, and two
got the garlic sausage with aligot. The former was a ho-hum steak (I've had better at Outback), and fries that seemed like baked Ore-Ida shoestring fries. The latter was more interesting, at least. The aligot appeared to be three parts cheese to two parts pureed garlic to one part mashed potatoes; I'm all for rich, but the balance here was _way_ off, and didn't make for a very palatable dish. On top of the aligot were the "sausages", which appeared to be slices of lightly roasted turkey mousse; it wasn't bad, but again nothing to write home about, and the only garlic flavor present was what rubbed off from the aligot.
I must admit that I enjoyed the cheese course a lot; it's
hard to mess up pine nuts, walnuts, brie, and blue cheese.
Finally, there was the dessert: creme brulee, which at
least two of us who were there have done significantly better in our own kitchens in the last few months. (One member of our party described the version there as tasting like "a roasted marshmellow", which was pretty accurate.)
So, have others been to Le Relais? Is the service normally
that bad? Is the food at all worth a return trip?
Very disappointed,
Sweth.Washington, DC