Live To Eat » Brasserie Margaux – A disastrous Valentine’s day dinner

Brasserie Margaux – A disastrous Valentine’s day dinner

16 February 2007 One Comment

For valentine’s day, Siv knew I wanted to go to a place we haven’t been to before, so he made reservations at the Brasserie Margaux in Belltown, the “French” restaurant at the Warwick hotel. I have French in quotes because they have Brasserie in the name, so they are aspiring to be French, but the cuisine is very Northwest!

Anyway, let me start with the service — HORRIBLE! We had an 8:00 PM reservation, showed up at 8:00 and were told that there is a 15 minutes wait. Totally fine, it is Valentine’s day, sometimes people spent a little more time than usual at the tables. There were lots of couples waiting at the bar for a table. 5 minutes through I suddenly got the feeling that I had left my straightening iron on at home, I knew it was going to bother me through the dinner, so we asked them if we have time to get out for 10 minutes, hostess checked the list and said, yeah it is going to be at least another 15 minutes before we can be seated. So we walked home, 7 minutes from the restaurant, my iron was plugged in and was really hot , lucky I remembered. Got back at the restaurant at 8:20; we were still 4th in the list! Went to the bar, had a wine. Around 9:00 when we saw they were seating people who showed up after us, Siv went over to check on the status. After we asked, they found a table for us at 9:05 finally! So, what was the idea there, we are already dissatisfied customers, so they didn’t care anymore? After we were seated, got our glasses of water at 9:20. If it was any other day, we would have left a long time ago, but on valentine’s day our only option would have been to go to McDonald’s down the street!

Now to the food. Their V-day special is a 6 course menu, $85 per person without wine pairing. It is prix-fix no changes, substitutions allowed. That was fine with us, since the menu looked really good. Well, writing a creative menu is easy; it is the delivery that gets tough.

Amuse Bouche :

North sound Judd Cove Oysters on the half shell with paddlefish caviar and champagne mignonette.

I have never had row oysters served at room temperature before, row oysters are almost always served on ice. These had been obviously sitting outside for a while. And serving oysters on the shell on a salad? Who will eat those leaves? What a disaster!

Starters:

Warm wilted Spinach with dry cherries, toasted pecans, goat cheese and pinot noir vinaigrette. nothing special at all, very blah…

Crispy Salmon and Dungeness crab roulade with sauteed mushrooms, grilled radicchio and rock shrimp ragout.

This dish was so oily, deep fried to death, and the ragout was just plain bad. The sauce was okay, but who cares. And the dish was huge, this is supposed to be an appetizer. I could only eat half of this.

Interlude

Pear Champagne sorbet – The whole idea of an interlude sorbet is to clear your palette, so why put so much sugar in it?

Main

Surf & Turf – Broiled 6 oz Lobster tail with smoked paprika and truffle cream, grilled 6 oz filet mignon with port wine demi glaze with a side of braised escarole and dauphiniose potatoes.

First of all, serving a 6 oz steak and a 6 oz lobster as part of a six course meal is just plain wrong! They didn’t ask us how we wanted our steak cooked, they just brought it medium well, and it was lukewarm. Also, I think my steak was at least 8 oz. Oh, and the port wine demi glaze really tasted like a BBQ sauce out of a bottle. The lobster was not bad, but the potatoes were the best part of this dish.

Dessert

Dark chocolate mousse filled with drunken strawberries surrounded by white chocolate and served with grand marnier and chambord strawberry coulis.

This was pretty good actually, but on keeping up with the theme of the meal this was huge as well. The nice touch was the writings on the white chocolate, “I love you” written in different languages.

All in all the most disastrous dinner we’ve had at a supposedly fine restaurant. What were they thinking? First of all this whole valentine’s day theme was just a money making endeavor for them, overbooking the tables, bringing out mass produced dishes under the pretense of fine food, not even letting us breath between courses! Did they even care if anyone showed up again? Now I wish we had gone to McDonald’s instead! I have no idea if a regular dinner here is any better, but I am not going to find out.

We did have a great time though, making fun of the food. , we were so hungry and annoyed initially, the whole thing started sounding so funny after a while, we were just laughing so hard, everyone thought we had gone crazy! Also, Sivv