date: 7/13/04
location: st. paul
grade: b

duck.

not what i ordered, what i had to do a lot. i was sitting in the seat at the table where staff got to close to hitting me in the head a few times two managed to wing my hair), i started automatically ducking when they came near me. and the odd thing is that they were not doing it on purpose, and there were several people who did this.

coupled with the fact that when i got there and asked for the reservation for 7:15 for 8 people under the name it was reserved under, and said it was not on the patio, i had to march to the patio because the host didn't believe me it wasn't them.

so if i had to grade on my experience alone, it would be a lower grade, believe you me. it's not a place where i'd want to return anytime soon, based on that.

anyway.

we had our largest group in ages, nine people (we had a bonus person show up).

the food. most people liked the bread. i thought it was a bit too wonder bread. no, i wasn't determined not to like it. because i did like my dinner, the pasta puttanesca. a generous serving. i wish it would have had a bit more of the red pepper flake. i ended up with that as i wasn't in a cream sauce place, and most of the other dishes on the menu were all cream sauce-y. i was happy with it.

i also sampled the crab stuffed salmon, which was pretty good. the scallops potato (hey, that's how it was listed on the specials menu) that came with it were reportedly more potato-y than scallop-y, in a good way. the fettucini with lobster cream sauce was nice, as the cream sauce was less heavy than it is in a lot of places, where it's all fatty and suchlike. the dish who's name i forgot but is a packet of different seafood and pasta tossed with oil and garlic (if i recall correctly) was quite good also, probably the best of the lot i tasted, i think. fettucini, ravioli, fusili (with meat sauce i think), and the other pasta dishes were good.

i wanted to try the tiramisu (the person who owns the place had a hand in the restaurant of that name), but it wasn't on the dessert menu, which is just as well, as no one but me wanted any, and i didn't want a whole one. the tulip (cookie) filled with marscapone and fruit looked good, though.

some of the prices on the menu seemed too high, some seemed ok. the apps seemed especially high priced, but i didn't get a look at them specifically, so i don't know if you get more than one crab cake for $9 or it's a really huge one or what. my main course wasn't much more spendy than that.

the service. we had one of the cheerful servers who upsell a lot. seemed competent, but the dishes were brought to the table by a bunch of different people and we had to play who gets the plate for everything. that gets old after... well, it gets old before it starts. it's dinner, not a quiz. they also add the 18% for larger parties for the tip, which is not my favorite policy, but they did take checks and were able to handle more than one credit card for the party. to me they seem maybe oddly not customer centered. i think this is due to the size of our group. some places are more adept of handling parties of more than four. they don't seem to have the je ne sais quoi of it down.