Fancy Restaurants.........love em or hate em?

[LabattBlue]

A 4-5 hour meal IMO…ridiculous.  

[Sweats]

25 minutes ago, LabattBlue said:

A 4-5 hour meal IMO…ridiculous.  

 

 

 

 

Oh, i know.......my wife loves it.

The only time i want to be in any establishment for 4-5 hours is drinking beer and eating wings.

[Saxum]

2 hours ago, LabattBlue said:

A 4-5 hour meal IMO…ridiculous.  

 

2 hours ago, Sweats said:

Oh, i know.......my wife loves it.

The only time i want to be in any establishment for 4-5 hours is drinking beer and eating wings.

 

My wife does it occasionally 4-5 hours with her Chinese lunch lady friends but they do not spend even in range of what others are talking about.

They repeated order from what I heard seafood dishes as well as Chinese staples.

But these ladies are earning much less than I expect the big spenders are.

[TheCockSportif]

Totally depends.  For me, it's always a balance between food quality, level of service, and price point overall.  If that balance is off, whether the restaurant is fancy or not, I get bent out of shape.

 

However, on the subject of fine dining, it's a mixed bag for me.  Typically my wife and I will go to a really nice restaurant on our anniversary, and sometimes this is when we're overseas in one place or another.  We had a Michelin-star meal in London in 2018, for our 10th, and it was beyond amazing.

 

But then there was Portugal.  Work took me to Lisbon a couple of weeks ago.  Lots of spouses/partners/etc came along, including my wife.  Enjoyed Lisbon and Porto immensely.

 

On the last night we went to this Michelin-starred place in Lisbon with a colleague and her partner, and it was... underwhelming... and expensive.  Sure, every dish looked like a smoke show, but none of the food was really (temperature) hot when they served it.  The sirloin was particularly bad, lukewarm, and sinewy.  (It's a Michelin-starred restaurant, you say?)  The service was great, the Portuguese wines were quite good, and they offered to fire another course for me, but it wasn't just the sirloin that bugged me.  Of an 8-course meal, only a couple of the courses were great.  The rest were just a smoke show -- lots of pizazz, without a comparable level of taste -- and for the price point, the food quality was abhorrent.  Even my wife was like, "yeah, for that price it should've been lights out food-wise.  And it wasn't."  Then they gave us this cookbook that was signed by the chef.

 

My wife and I have been cooking for 20 years now, and we have loads of cookbooks.  We literally just culled the herd.  This cookbook was precious, and in thumbing through it we'd not make a single recipe out of it.  So now it's at Goodwill.

 

No issues with fine dining, and I certainly don't need fine dining to make me happy when I eat out, but definitely have issues with poor execution and pretense.