Mother's Day Dinner at Métro Bis

[marcmagus]

Went down to Hartford to have a Mother's Day dinner with my parents, my uncle, and my grandmother today. As always, it was lovely to see my family, and it's great to see how well Grandma is doing right now.

Dinner was a 6pm reservation at Métro Bis, in Simsbury, CT. They're usually not open on Sundays, but they did some special thing with seating from 10am until 7pm for Mother's Day.

I don't know that I'd ordinarily be posting something like this, but I am trying to post a bit more, and the contrast between the restaurant's self-congratulatory hip Frenchness and the food they delivered was striking, and a sore disappointment for Mother's Day. The staff, I'll note, were lovely, attentive, and on top of things. The decor was a bit odd; overall quite pleasant and suggesting you'll get a good meal, although the framed chef's coat on the wall might have been a bit much.

Appetizer: I had the gorgonzola baby greens salad, with candied walnuts, sun-dried tomatoes, roasted garlic, and kalamata olives. I'll admit, I was a little skeptical of this salad (it has two ingredients that I'm not a huge fan of), but I thought I'd take a chance and see if it all blended together into something special. It didn't. The greens were nice and fresh and would have made a really pleasant salad with a light vinaigrette. However, in this salad they were dry and a little bitter. The garlic was served slightly chilled, rendering it mostly tasting bitter, rather than slightly warm, creamy, sweet, and delicious. Walnuts, even candied, taste a bit bitter. The cheese, whose fattiness should have complemented the bitterness of everything else and blended it together, was almost completely absent (there was a light dusting of pinhead-sized crumbles of gorgonzola, which weren't enough to lend either flavor or mouthfeel to the dish). The olives were salty, which was at least different, but they're not my favorite flavor. The tomatoes were present. Even when I managed to come up with one mouthful combining everything together, I wasn't impressed, and the rest of it was lacking. The whole thing just felt pretentious. [I see on the regular dinner menu that my salad supposedly has a balsamic vinaigrette. Could have fooled me.]

Entree: Ribeye with a something reduction and a side of something potato-based [apparently not on the regular menu]. Credit where credit is due, my ribeye was cooked to a perfect rare doneness, and it looked like the medium-rares elsewhere at the table were also accurate. Unfortunately, they seem to have managed to find the least-marbled piece of rib-eye ever sold (and it wasn't particularly flavorful to make up for it). The potato thing under my huge slab of mediocre meat wasn't particularly inspiring (in retrospect, it kind of tasted like burnt garlic). We did have a pleasant bottle of wine, though.

Oh, remember how I mentioned the time of our meal and the times they were open? Mom tried to order the salmon. They were out. About half an hour later, I overheard that they'd run out of the swordfish. On Mother's Day they don't plan to have in enough of the fish, which, at least in my limited experience, is more frequently eaten by women? My mother shouldn't have to revisit the menu to figure out what she's willing to eat on Mother's Day.

Tea: Métro Bis has the excellent taste to serve Harney and Sons excellent teas, in the sachets. Their selection was slightly uninspiring (I don't care for Earl Grey, English Breakfast with dessert didn't feel quite right, and most of the others were decaffeinated or similarly not what I wanted), but I settled on the Hot Cinnamon Spice, which I thought would complement my Crème Brulèe reasonably. Which it would have, except that I didn't notice until I went to pour my tea out of the lovely Japanese-style iron teapot that the water they'd served me was warm. The tea I got was pallid, and tasted almost exclusively of clove, slightly numbing my tongue and not really exciting me.

Dessert: Crème Brulèe, as I mentioned. I've been surprising myself by often selecting this at nice restaurants recently, skipping over a lot of chocolatey things and whatnot for a simple, clean flavor that goes nicely with tea and is delicious and feels good in my mouth. The custard was really quite delicious. The sugar was burnt. Yes, I know, it's supposed to be, but this was burnt in the tasting like I was eating charcoal sense. Not a fine dining experience.

Conclusion: Pretentious and can't live up to itself. I'm not normally a person who takes issue with every single item he's served in a restaurant. I'm not sure it would have been worth it even at half the price.