OT: Laguna dining ripoff

Very interesting point. It happened to me over 10 years ago in a well-known then three Michelin star restaurant in Florence: Enoteca Pinchiorri. A German gastonopmical critic reported the same from "La Tour d'Argent" in Paris - arguably the most famous restaurant in the world - in the mid-1970s. He saw it as a gesture of "We never make mistakes, Sir!". They didn't make a mistake at Pinchiorri neither - but I have to admit, I didn't feel comfortably.

M.

Salut/Hi Cwdjrx,

(without wanting to pry, a fist name would look less bizarre "an it please you"). le/on Fri, 6 Aug 2004 23:31:01 -0500, tu disais/you said:-

Thaks for a fascinating comment. I guess most of us have some image of a "defining experience" of top class dining.

[snip on a perfect description of good service]

EXACTLY!!! There went you want 'em invisible when you don't. Friendly without being intimate, at your service without being servile, and unashamed of doing their utmost to make your experience a pleasant one.

I wondr how much that's down to food hygiene laws. In Europe - I don't know the details - for example, there is a limit on how long a restaurant may keep a stock, and it's so short, that it's become almost impossible to make a classic sauce demi-glace in the time limit (this is anecdotal from several chefs).

The worst is in the description Roast beef with "Au Jus sauce"!! GRRRRRRR.

I guess that was the dilemma Dale found himself in.

[] (other quotes attributed to Cwdjrx)

] >When I dined at Le Pavillion, it was a fairly large restaurant with a ] >quite large, well trained staff ] [snip on a perfect description of good service] ] >looked up and in the direction of the staff, someone was soon at your ] >table. There were no long speeches. ] ] EXACTLY!!! There went you want 'em invisible when you don't. Friendly ] without being intimate, at your service without being servile, and unashamed ] of doing their utmost to make your experience a pleasant one. ]

I must point out that even a 3 star can slip up on service. Some years ago we ate at Lucas Carton in Paris. The service was positively suffocating. If you hesitated with your glass raised (God forbid you were to propose a toast)

4 waiters would immediately cluster tightly around. These guys never so much as let their eyes wander from us. I swear, if I had sniffed, someone would have been over to blow me nose.

To me, too much service is worse than too little.

] >These days, most so-called fine restaurants are too lazy or do not know ] >how to produce a classic consomme or a proper classic sauce. ] ] I wondr how much that's down to food hygiene laws. In Europe - I don't know ] the details - for example, there is a limit on how long a restaurant may ] keep a stock, and it's so short, that it's become almost impossible to make ] a classic sauce demi-glace in the time limit (this is anecdotal from several ] chefs). ]

Has anyone mentioned the law in California that forbids serving meat rare? Or is that just a San Francisco thing?

-E

Emery Davis states: "I must point out that even a 3 star can slip up on service. Some years ago we ate at Lucas Carton in Paris. The service was positively suffocating. If you hesitated with your glass raised (God forbid you were to propose a toast) 4 waiters would immediately cluster tightly around. These guys never so much as let their eyes wander from us. I swear, if I had sniffed, someone would have been over to blow me nose. To me, too much service is worse than too little."

I have heard of examples of what you mention in the US, but mostly in the distant past. I remember being taken to a very upscale cocktail joint in Houston,Texas many years ago when more people than not smoked at such places. They had two cigarette lighter waiters dressed in Tuxedo who would run across the room to light a cigarette if anyone appeared to be reaching for one. It was nearly comic, because they moved so fast.

Then there was the old Pump Room in Chicago. I never ate there, but heard it described by friends and some food critics. The food was fairly decent, but did not compare with the best in New York or San Francsco. However it was closer to a movie set than a restaurant. Heaven help you if you ordered their salad. An elaborate salad cart was pushed out and several waiters went to work making the salad. I remember that a critic wrote that the salad was no better than at many other places. For the high price for it you were paying for an elaborate show. The coffee boy there also appeared to be out of a movie set or an Opera. The Pump Room attracted a lot of entertaiment business types when they were in Chicago. They had special tables for a few of the most famous stars that they cold use anytime they were in Chicago.

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net from my email address. Then add snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . I do not check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.

Mark,

I thought Garretson's wines were big, powerful, ripe and alcoholic. I enjoy that style, but I get the impression from Dale's postings that he prefers a more restrained, elegant style. Since I've never had the pleasure of meeting Dale or sharing wine with him, perhaps I spoke out of turn.

I agree about Garretson's pricing - I bought a few bottles, but then I buy very few in the US$30-45 range. I bought them mainly because they opened the tasting room just because I asked them to, and I thought it churlish to do that and then not make a purchase. I knew going in what the wines cost.

OTOH Justin (who I also visited) charges $55 for the latest version of Tapestry. It's 77% CS, and they're selling the straight CS for $22. Clearly the Tapestry is more complex and will IMHO age better, but its not worth almost 3 times as much. At least not to me.

Dean

I used to work in LA and had a fair share of problems with the top restaurants. I had a yelling match with the matrix de one night and after that I made my reservations in the name of Senator or Representative so and so. They knew how to handle the movie people but didn't have a clue about politicos. I never had a problem getting seated after that.

I did get ripped off on the specials one time that just about put me in debt for the gross national product. They said they had a very fine champagne by the glass so I ordered a couple and then at the end they had a nice port so we got two of those. The champagne was $28/glass and port was $50/glass and that was 1985. And the young lady with me did not even appreciate the port.

On another occasion in LA I fell victim to a wine scam where the restaurant had purchased the wine cellar of another famous restaurant that had burned down. The wine was all cooked but they were pretending that it was all good.

in article snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net, Bill at snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net wrote on 8/7/04 6:20 PM:

It is apparent that LA is an easy target for restaurant horror stories but I really can't believe the same can't be said about most (if not all) metropolitan cities. Some of the comments expressed in this and related threads make it sound like LA is a place to be avoided at all costs. I, for one, find such a broad-brush criticism to be categorically unfair. Come on, folks, the LA metropolitan area is home to 14,000,000+ people, some of whom suffer from delusions of their own grandeur, no doubt. Of course it has it's share of negative restaurant situations, but I've lived here 45 years and have had only a handful of such experiences.

I've recently become acquainted with a website which has geographically separated posting boards for several major US metro areas. These boards are frequented by people who enjoy eating out and sharing reviews and experiences. I would guess that the LA area board alone has as many posts per day as this newsgroup. The restaurants covered range all over the map (including a lot of "upper-crust" and trendy spots), and the experiences related are almost always about the quality of the food (usually compared to other other establishments of similar type). People often say that a particular meal may not have been worth the price, and sometimes that the service wasn't up to par, but it is quite unusual to find stories of the level of extreme negativity related in these threads.

Believe it or not.........As I was finishing this post, my 24 year-old son called to relate the following: He, his girlfriend, and another couple had a 7:30 reservation at a nicer restaurant at South Coast Plaza (upper end shopping area) this evening. They arrived on time and had to wait one hour to be seated. They related their unhappiness to their waiter, who promptly gave them their first round of drinks on the house. They were pleased. Minutes later the manager came over to their table and apologized profusely, telling them that their entire evening would be on the house as well. The waiter got a huge tip, and four people had a terrific time. The restaurant is about 15 miles from French 75, the place that started this whole thread.

I am sorry that my comments were taken as a blanket condemnation of LA dinning. In the 20 years of dinning in the various parts of town, those were just about my only negative experiences. It does not take long to learn the tricks and what to stay away from. I found that I could dine well any time and without the long drives that LA is noted for. I made friends with a lot of owners including the owner of the restaurant that ripped me off with the champagne.

Salut/Hi Emery Davis,

le/on Sat, 7 Aug 2004 18:55:19 +0200, tu disais/you said:-

Of course they can. Errare humanum est. And trying too hard to be perfect can be as irritating as not trying at all. That's really what I was trying to get at when I talked about "intelligent" service. My step brother likes waiters to be servile and over attentive. He makes life a misery for them and then tips very heavily (he's a boor and I won't eat out with him). My brother wants waiters to be entirely impersonal giving perfect service without making any human contact. I want waiters whose advice I can seek, and with whom I can chat a bit. In a REALLY good restaurant, all three of us will be satisfied as the wait staff will adapt intelligently to the three of us and what we want.

I know that the fear of e-coli in the States is such that it's virtually impossible to get a hamburger properly rare, and I believe it to be illegal nowadays to use a raw egg to make mayonnaise in a restaurant there (salmonella is endemic - even pandemic - in battery chicken farms, I understand). Sadly bureacratic lunacy isn't limited either to Europe or to the USA.

in article snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net, Bill at snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net wrote on 8/8/04 7:49 AM:

My post was not meant to single you out in particular. There have been a good number far more damning than yours and the overall impression, I thought, painted a very negative picture of the city. I just thought I needed to say something in response.

I've eaten at many good some great restaurants in the LA area. French 75 and several others like it try to make as much per patron as the market will beard. Are there more of these per square mile in LA, no. Is the food in the LA area as good as justified for such a large population center, yes if you look well. Unfortuantely, that isn't easy to do in a short trip. And as far as if there are more rip-off restaurants in LA yes, because they deal with movie people who seem to have no concept of money or value. They just like places becasue they are new or because they are places to be seen.

"Midlife" in news:BD3B1E13.5E83% snipped-for-privacy@cox.net...

Everyone I've heard or read who's a serious student of lively US restaurant scenes regards Los Angeles in the very first rank, owing to its vast and diverse restaurant population in recent decades. (Maybe some of the colorful characters and situations in restaurants there reflect the presence also of image-related entertainment industry). I've never lived there but have visited many times, and have family there going back many decades, and have notes on delightful meals of many kinds and prices. With the large, relatively prosperous population, Los Angeles concentrates not only restaurants but also wine enthusiasts.

An aspect of Los Angeles, rarely cited but a factor in its style, is its unusual growth history even by US standards. US census data show population from 1900 to 2002 growing by the ratio 1 to 132. Aubrey Drury in his 1935 book on California remarked on the population growth (from small origins, rapidly surpassing San Francisco as US West-coast population center by 1920) and quoted a then-current saying "If you haven't been in Los Angeles in the last three months you are behind the times." Development during and after the second world war added momentum.

I noticed 20 and 30 years ago that mentions of "US food cities" (often reflecting long tradition, even to the 19th century), omitted Los Angeles, but that would be natural in view of its relative youth. (The lists I saw always mentioned NYC, New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, and sometimes Kansas City.) Today, very experienced people I know who live even around San Francisco (a town traditionally sharply conscious of being surpassed as western-US population center by 1920) bow respectfully to the restaurants of Los Angeles.

I should have mentioned that I didn't think of the smoking issue when making reservation- apparently outdoor patio areas have no restrictions. Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

I think you mean Isoceles, Tapestry is a BV wine. With alittle looking, you can usually find Isoceles for $45. I'm not sure I regard that as a deal, but better than $55 :)

Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

The worst dining experience I've had was at Le Crocodil in Vancouver B.C.; I brought a Domaine Ostertag Reisling V.T. and was told their corkage fee in a very loud voice before we even sat down. We (my father and I) were then ignored unless the waiter brought the dishes, only to disappear again. A waiter who was not ours came to pour our wine in our waiters absence. Later in the evening I ordered a glass of Loupiac and found it tired and flat, when I asked about it's freshness I was told matter of factly "everyone else liked it!" My father likes cheese for dessert (I don't), the menu listed a cheese service for two- when he asked if he could have it for one instead of two he was told they couldn't do it. While we were being ignored, a group of waiters was fawning all over the table next to us- even making them a dessert they didn't order. Not only did we not complain but my dad tipped the usual amount. We were stunned by the poor service and will never go back. We had the exact opposite happen at Piccolo Mondo down the street from Croc- perfect service both times we went. They were out of the dessert wine I wanted so they let me try all of them on the house till I chose the one I liked. Bravo!

Well roared, Hoare!

M.