A glass case [at the cafe-slash-wine bar] serves as a temporary prison for aging pastries and tragic snacks.
The “crispy shrimp” have the limp, expired quality of tempura that’s been doing laps all night at a conveyor-belt sushi place.
The thicker crust around a farmhouse pork terrine, served with a chill that brought out its Spammy qualities, is on its way to being cooked. The very, very thick football of crust encasing beef Wellington is cooked only on the surface; deep inside, where it meets the tenderloin, is a mass of wet, gluey dough. This costs $95 and will serve two people, both of whom had better like the taste of raw flour.
Atmosphere: Cafe in the front, bar in the middle, dining in the back. Desperation all around. Servers often seem to be hiding panic; you want to ask them to blink twice if they’re being held against their will.
We obviously had different Beef Wellingtons. Mine was fantastic and he doesn’t seem to have sampled either the excellent dressed crab or the execrable artichoke and foie gras.
I liked → “Yellowfin tuna poke has been tossed onto a big, damp heap of unseasoned quinoa, which must be there to soak up any seasoning that accidentally attaches itself to the fish.”
Rayner is the worst. He is just a caricature at this point. He is the type of reviewer that goes into a restaurant hoping to find something bad that he can flame.