Oct. 12th, 2013 10:15 pm

Passing on

muckefuck: (zhongkui)
[personal profile] muckefuck
[livejournal.com profile] monshu thought today should be marked with a special restaurant trip. My suggestion had been to get brunch downtown, but after a fitful night of listening to the cat retch, all I wanted to do was come back home and crash. He had originally been thinking dinner anyway, and though I wasn't opposed to the idea, I was worried about the timing given that Game 2 of the NLCS was scheduled for 3 p.m. EDT and Game 1 had lasted over five hours.

Mercifully, however, there were no extra innings today. The game was as low-scoring as it's possible to be (the Cards took it 1-0) and both pitchers were fast workers, so it was clear by about 4 p.m. that we could make dinner at 7. The Old Man put himself in my hands, and I bundled us into the Broadway bus, thinking we'd revisit a favoured haunt in the old neighbourhood. But La Fonda was closed for a private event, and we decided to hit another: the reopened Pasteur.

Reviews had been mixed since they reappeared in the old space last spring and we figured they might be taking some time to find their footing again. The interior looked much the same, only better: They'd ditched the pink and some of the potted plants for two large planters and a cool pale green. Two things struck me about the menu: That it was bigger and that it included a lot of ordinary Vietnamese standards. (The appeal of the earlier incarnation--and, frankly, the justification for charging thrice what you'd pay on Argyle--was their elegant twist on that cuisine.)

The cocktail menu looked vile. When your lead-off offering includes both 43 and Apple Pucker, you know you're in cack hands before you even run up again names like "Me So Mango". There was a liberal use of flavoured syrups in cocktails which already contained liqueur; that was one of the problems with my "Ginger Collins". The other was that it was weak and watery. (Another bad sign: [livejournal.com profile] monshu's cocktail was made with green Chartreuse and the server had to tell us which was which, because it wasn't obvious at a glance.) Incidentally, it's a real shame that our server had studied at the Chatty and Casual School of No Charm because everyone else who came to the table was so consummately professional.

Our starters were dull. I singled out those which were different than what you could find a few blocks south and ordered a salmon chả giò and the battered shrimp. The rolls were fine, but cried out for more seasoning; all you could really taste was dill. The shrimp were so bland we forgot why we'd ordered them; it was only when rethinking that decision that I remembered they were supposed to be stuffed with mushroom and...something else?

Our entrées were tastier but not without their problems. The monkfish curry was very generous on the fish, which was good and firm. [livejournal.com profile] monshu also liked the eggplant in it; I, predictably, did not, but we could both agree that the squash had been cooked to hell. It was hard to say what had changed about the seasoning on the bò lúc lắc except that it seemed a little sweeter. They also used a cheaper cut of beef (filet mignon my ass).

Then something happened to tip our assessment out of the "meh" column and into "never again": I found a piece of plastic in the beef dish. It was a strip about half a centimeter wide and as long as a finger joint with black scorch marks. Both of us tried to bite through it and couldn't. I set in on a plate and informed our waitress, who took it to the kitchen. When she came back, she tried to convince me it was a piece "from the outer part of the onion".

Let me ask you: Have any of you in your lives ever come across a piece of onion--raw or cooked--you could not bite through? I politely made this point to our server, who just repeated what she'd said before, so I waited until after the meal (to make it clear I wasn't just angling for comps) to bring it up with the blasé manager. He kept saying, "I didn't see it". Well, I not only saw it, I bit on it, and if I'd swallowed it, I would've choked.

When you revisit an old favourite, you always need to be braced for disappointment. I was prepared for some of that, but nothing on this scale. If I'd let it, the experience could easily have ruined the evening. But the Old Man was so philosophical about it all that I took it completely in stride. "Now you've got a story for your blog!" he said brightly as we strolled out into the mild moonlit night. "And we still have La Fonda to look forward to!" I added.
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