Guest Bloggle

At the Blackened Out Hedge Fund Annual Planning meeting, a decision was made to use today to write a menu for the Saints second Super Bowl. Instead of that joyous post, here is a guest blog from Bloggle. 

The amuse bouche from Meson 923, which opened in 2010 as a highly ambitious restaurant.

I've eaten in plenty of restaurants. To bastardize an already cheesy phrase from Jon Bon Jovi (or is it Plato) "I've seen a million (restaurants), and I've rocked them all."  I've seen the highest of highs and the lowest of lows and every time I leave a restaurant I feel that I've learned something new as a diner, a new experience to file in the catalog of a gustatory hobby.  However, this past Saturday night all of that came to a screeching halt when I had the most confusing and bewildering restaurant experience of my life.  I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, whether to run screaming or look for the hidden cameras.  Indeed it was an experience that made me question what makes a restaurant and why we in the hell we even dine out.

Meson 923 began a few years back as one of the most exciting new haute cuisine restaurants in the city, with a sleek modern look and a menu to match.  I dined there maybe a half-dozen over their existence and was duly impressed by the effort of the chef each time.  Sadly, though, those days are gone, those chefs have moved on and the issues behind the scenes over there are now well documented.  Meson 923 had its run, but now it's over.

Or so we thought.  It appears as though the building's owner has decided to take the reins and run the restaurant on his own.  I've seen that movie before and it never has a happy ending My wife and I went on the suggestion and invitation of some friends, with a warning of what we might be facing.  Experienced diners all, we said "What the hell, what's the worst that can happen?"

We walked into the still tony dining room, still with its sparse minimalist tables, sharply designed chairs, and noticeable lack of wall coverings (we did not, however, fail to notice the addition of a brilliantly lit pair of neon signs in the window, one reading "Open" the other, "Steaks").

It still looked like Meson 923, until we realized there was no one to greet us, other than a pair of people at the bar who looked more like they had gotten lost on their way to the Corporation Bar on the opposite corner than they looked like they worked in this (or any) restaurant.   Confusion on this staff's part ensued when one of them tried to sit us in the dining room,  the other insisted instead on separate tables in the bar area. The brief tete-a-tete thankfully had swift and happy ending when we were finally sat all together at the same table.  Unfortunately, it was the last moral victory of the night.

Some places have servers with bling, others have service with a smile.  Understandably, not every restaurant has the happiest of servers, some places even pride themselves on the rudeness of their staff.  This place however, eerily had none of the above.  A third staff member emerged after we were sat and approached our table.  When we asked if he was our waiter he said in his best Steven Wright deadpan "I can be."

Immediately came the question "What kind of dressing would you like on your salads?"  We  asked about things like, say, menus and a drink list, he brushed that off by saying they don't have a menu and the chef is going to cook whatever he wants to anyway.  He then followed up his question again a little more brusquely "What KIND of DRESSING would you like on your salads?!"

That night, Thousand Island, Blue Cheese, Ranch and Oil/Vinegar (at right) were the institutionalized choices you got on a bowl of very roughly cut, sub-par Romaine lettuce that looked like it was purchased from the ill-fated Suda Salvage Discount Grocery Store and chopped with a pocket knife by Cub Scout Troop 1923.  I nibbled on a sad, flavorless tomato and wept inwardly thinking about the succulent Barrileux Farms creoles I had picked up that morning at the farmer's market.  It may have crossed my mind to ask if the restaurant had a corkage policy for tomatoes.

The salads are not your only pre-entrée choices.  Immediately upon us sitting down we were bombarded with a plate of thickly buttered and grilled hamburger bun bottoms that looked like they were buttered by Paula Deen having a biggest dick contest with the American Heart Association. (above)  It was explained to us that this amuse-bouche was on the house.

Thankfully we were well stocked with wine in tow, and as luck would have it someone suggested we bring our own glasses, since the place didn't seem to have any of those either.

Now it was time to order.  The roadie crew from the Molly Hatchet '83 World Tour that sat us was gone, as was our original server.  A fourth staff member emerged to inform us the menu choices were three cuts of steak and two types of fish.  The steaks were to be grilled with salt and pepper, the fish only with lemon and salt.  No sauce, no alternative preparations.  Nothing.  When asked if my redfish would be grilled the answer was "I'll tell the chef, but he's going to cook it however he wants to cook it."  She repeated that same answer when one of our party ordered their Rib-Eye cooked medium.

We asked about sides and the answer was "we'll send out what we have", which turned out to be black-eyed peas (undoubtedly stirred with a salt-lick), plain baked potatoes, and a bowl of spinach and mushrooms.  If the array of sides weren't all canned then whoever thought to present these items as fresh needs to be beaten with a rolled up copy of Gourmet magazine and have his nose shoved in that insipid bowl of salty mush parading as black-eyed peas.

Entrées arrive and unfortunately my fish was poached, but then again, fortunately it wasn't redfish.  I thought about inquiring further about what happened to the redfish but backed down when I saw the chef appear to be yelling at someone in the kitchen.  To the kitchen's credit the fish was fresh, and a dining companion said the NY Strip was well cooked, but so what?  I can grill a steak and boil a piece of fish with lemon and salt at home.

As we trudged on, we began to discuss the thorough lack of anything that resembled a structured staff combined with such a rudimentary menu.  We pondered that maybe the "secret" menu was an attempt to duplicate a Charlie's Steak House.  This was when I when I started questioning what makes a restaurant.

By this point we were all deep in the glass and the effort to suppress our giggle reflex became increasingly moot.  The suggestion by the server that they were washing some more silverware so we could eat drew snickers, the serving of side dishes on tea plates drew slight chuckles, after asking for a napkin and seeing the arrival of a roll of paper towels a full guffaw ensued.

Thinking we were on the finish line of paying and getting out of there alive three very large pieces of pie showed up.  Apple, something else, I'm not certain.  To be frank, I did not eat the pie.   It could have been the best pie ever made by the hand of man, but I sure as hell wasn't touching it.  The claim was the pie was made in house.  Actually that's unfair, it could have been made by mom, if mom works at Sysco.

By this point I was so bewildered and so beside myself that I was going to have to pay money for this train wreck of a meal, to pay for such an unmitigated disjointed experience that was so disproportionate in its ineptitude to the beauty of the room in which it happened, to pay money to someone that so obviously could not care less about the experience he provided that I began to question I put forth earlier.

The experience of art is unique and singular.  Maybe the experience I had last Saturday night at the former Meson 923 is a grand joke, an artistic statement against the mores of fine dining, a voice behind the curtain telling us that we're full of shit by taking restaurants too seriously.  If that were the case it would be the finest example of performance art I've ever seen.  Unfortunately there was obviously no intent for it to be.  Whether this new owner is trying to create the next Crescent City Steakhouse or just trying to keep the doors open until he can offload the place to the next wide-eyed entrepreneur remains to be seen.  Either way it was a miserable failure, intended or not.

Dueling Bloggers: Tipping

Photo courtesy of the New England Wedding Blog.

Peter: I'll be honest - I have no concrete notion of what is proper tipping etiquette.  Some people (maybe most?) calculate gratuity based on the pre-tax total. I have always based gratuity on the bottom line total including tax, and I don't know exactly why other than because that's how my Dad always did it. I usually tip 18% unless I am constantly trying to get the waiter's attention away from his iPhone to refill my water glass or futily searching for him while he is on a smoke break, in which case the tip gets knocked down to 15%. For higher end restaurants, I usually bump it up to 20%.

Rene: Daddy Warbucks and his pocketfuls of greenbacks over here. You probably spend a good amount of time tipping everyone and anyone who looks your way. Two things, first I usually tip on the pre-tax dollars. Real misers tip on the pre-tax and pre-drinks amount, but that seems a little cheap to me. Also, I try not to judge tipping by the location or style of a restaurant. Consider the humble breakfast waitress. She gets up at 4 a.m., refills coffee near endlessly, makes sure your eggs are scrambled softly, fetches you an extra biscuit, and snags the Sports page for you. All of that work and the bill is $12. I was always told and try to follow (when I do eat breakfast out) to tip breakfast waiters and waitresses over 30%. Maybe I am just more considerate and appreciative than you, Warbucks.

Peter: Here is an interesting question emailed to us by a faithful Blackened Out reader named Kelly: Is it customary to tip on take out? I always tip on takeout, but usually only to the tune of a few dollars. My rationale is this: If the bartender handles take out orders, and the bartender makes a living on tips, then throw him a couple of bucks. Here is another question for you, oh King of Corkage: When you bring a bottle of wine to a restaurant, do you calculate gratuity solely on the corkage fee or do you calculate based on the value of the wine that you brought in?

Rene: I do tip on take out, but usually only by adding a dollar and rounding up to the next whole dollar. So let's say the bill is $27.39, I would tip $1.61. This is stupid and it doesn't really make sense. No one is actually serving me anything, consider it a guilty conscience. Also, I must add that the growing proliferation of restaurants that take credit cards and print a receipt with a gratuity line has created an almost Pavlovian reaction to tipping. Listen up, dry cleaners, Walgreens, liquor stores, if there is a gratuity line, 9 times out of 10 you can trick me into leaving a tip.

As for corkage, I usually just add a base line amount to the regular tip based on how the wine service went. For instance, when we dined at Meson 923. The wine, a White Burgundy, was constantly taken from the table and placed in a wine bucket across the room chilling it and destroying the almond cream and mushroom aromas. Now despite my repeated requests to stop doing that, I may have been able to let it slide. If, and this is a HUGE if, I didn't have to get up and traipse across the room to retrieve said wine each time our glasses were empty. For that wine "service" I added $5 to the tip. For anything approaching competent service I'd probably do 20% of the cost of the wine to me added to regular tip.

Peter: If it takes forever to get your food, do you discount the server's gratuity even if the problem is most likely attributable to the back of the house? What about if the restaurant is understaffed (through no fault of the server), and therefore the server is spread too thin?  The service industry is a tough way to make a living, and the front of the house gets the brunt of the complaints because they are the ones dealing face to face with the customers. The back of the house gets paid the same no matter if the food is good or bad. Such is not the case with servers, but I try not to punish a waiter for problems outside of his control.  The only service issue which has the potential too drastically discount gratuity is if I am waiting an extended period of time to either get my check or run my credit card.

Rene: This brings up a very interesting argument. As we have talked about before, in Europe and elsewhere service is included in the price of the meal. In America, is tipping a way of passing the cost of service from the restaurant owner to the consumer? I say yes. But that this is not a bad thing. The number one thing we hear from friends and reader (they are pretty much mutually exclusive) is service complaints. If prices were higher and service was included, people would complain that they are paying for a service that doesn't please them. This way the patron decides the value of the server's wages. However, it should be the role of management and the kitchen to ensure the waitstaff is in the best possible position to make the most amount of money. When that happens, regardless of the restaurant, everyone wins.

Winesday: "There was Corkage, Jerry! Major Corkage"

"Corkage" is a fancy term for bringing your own bottle of wine into a restaurant. You may often hear the term "corkage fee." This refers to the amount a restaurant charges you wither per bottle or a lump sum to bring in your own wines and have them poured for you. Opinions on the issue of corkage fee are as varied as the wines they are subject to, but here is a generalized rough outline of the debate.

From the Restaurant Side

A restaurant, like any business, has to make money in order to continue to operate. After subtracting food costs, labor costs, rent, insurance, and other expenses, a typical restaurant's profit margin is around 5%.

Restaurants depend on wine and other beverage sales to help boost the bottom line. Ordering a bottle of wine is roughly the equivalent of adding an extra person to your table without the expense of cooking for that person. The more wine sold, the more revenue added.

Restaurants know this. They also know most people enjoy drinking wine or a cocktail or beer or iced tea with lunch or dinner. To maximize the jolt to the bottom line, they typically mark up alcohol by as much as 400% wholesale (iced tea is around 1000% - the lesson, as always, is drink up). So a bottle of wine they purchase from Republic for $8 is $32 on their list. That same wine may be $16 in a shop.

Restaurants have a vested interest, as they should, in having you order wine from their list. They know their food, the chefs seasonings, and the provenance of the wines on their list. A restaurant, if it is any good, puts time and effort into selecting wines to match their food. If you bring in a wine that doesn't mesh with their food, you may leave with a bad opinion of the restaurant.

The Diner Side

I've heard one or both of the above arguments from industry folks as to why they discourage, albeit lightly, customers bringing in their own wines. And for a while, I sort of believed it or at least their argument discouraged me from bringing wine to restaurants. But lately, I've gotten frisky and started bringing wine to restaurants for special occasions. Because I've spent considerable amounts of money acquiring wines, I want to drink them with great food. What's more, sometimes I want to do so without having to cook the dishes myself.

Discussing food, restaurants, and the vinification techniques of Spanish winemakers is the new "water cooler" talk. As our awareness of food and wine grows, it is important for restaurateurs to recognize that it is in fact a good thing when Joe Diner wants to bring in a very special bottle of wine. It is an affirmative statement by the diner that he trusts your chef, your wait staff, and your restaurant with his best wines.

Secondly, the markup on wines leads to a law of diminishing returns. Now, say we are just popping out for a few pizzas. There I don't mind paying $30 for a bottle of wine that may only be $15 in the store because the overall cost of the meal is much less. But what about when you dine big with apps in the high teens and entrees in enjoying their thirty-somethings? Paying $150 for a $70 bottle of wine just doesn't seem to be a good value on the expense to pleasure ratio.

Please note that typically the more expensive the wine, the lower the markup. And that not all fine dining experiences gouge you on wine prices. In fact, we ate at Stella! recently and noticed the wine list runs the gamut from very affordable bottles in the $30 range to a wallet busting $20,000 3L of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild. The latter has the Pope's name all over it.

So where are you on the corkage debate? My view is this, sometimes it is preferable to bring a great bottle of wine to a really good restaurant. But your opinion may and should differ. In the end, corkage will always be an interesting debate with varying viewpoints. With that in mind, here is a personal corkage policy - mostly pirated from elsewhere - that I try and follow.

1) Don't do it often. A Friday lunch at Mandina's, doesn't need that bottle of wine you got on closeout from Martin's. Just pay the tariff.

2) Call ahead. Always call the restaurant to make sure a) they allow outside wine b) what special conditions they have in regards to their corkage policy. If you don't like their answer to b), it is not their fault. Either suck it up or go elsewhere.

3) Never bring a bottle that is on the restaurant's list.

4) If you bring something like Yellow Tail into a restaurant, don't be surprised if you get kicked in the balls. Note: if the restaurant doesn't have a liquor license, feel free to bring something inexpensive. Again if it is Yellow Tail, you will get kicked in the balls.

5) Make sure the carpet matches the drapes. Have a great Napa cult cab that you bought on your honeymoon and are dying to taste again? Don't take it to a sushi restaurant.

6) Offer a taste to the waiter, sommelier, manager, etc... Just that simple gesture goes a long way. Also, you may find that any corkage fee will disappear if you order another bottle of wine or a cocktail/after dinner drink.

7) Don't be an asshole.

That wine in the upper right? A killer bottle of white burgundy that Lindsay and I brought to Meson 923 the other week. Opened with notes of crushed nuts and pastry cream (translation: tasted like wedding cake at first), then evolved into a stone fruit bonanza (translation: it was very good). The dishes the wine was able to dance with included a shrimp, ham, and melon appetizer, grilled quail with Jamaican sauce and chow chow, duck with corn and sweet potatoes, and scallops with asparagus.

Jazz Fest Food

When it comes to Jazz Fest, there are two kinds of people: those that go for the bands and those that go for the food. Place us in the latter category. Every festival goer has his/her favorite foods (mine meat pies for me, cochon de lait po-boy for Peter), and chefs are no different. This article in the Jazz Fest Bible put out by offBEAT Magazine, gives you a chef's eye view to eating right on da grounds.

The food at Jazz Fest is so extensive and diverse that one would need to attend everyday in order to try it all. But if you had to pick just a few things to eat at the Fair Grounds, what would they be? Is crawfish bread really worth waiting in line for? What's the most underrated food available? Is there anything wrong with just drinking Miller Lite all day and baking in the sun? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Whatever you are eating this weekend, remember to bring your pancho because it looks like it's going to be a wet one.