Breakfast, lunch, dinner, crab cakes eggs Benedict, fish and chips, smokedwhitefish salad, escargot with parsley butter, beef carpaccio, bacon-wrapped meatloaf, Belgian waffles, blackened rib-eye steak. If you want it—if you’ve ever wanted it—it’s here, at a downtown restaurant with a redleather- booth diner vibe.
But this is probably not the frisée salad you had in mind. It is bitterly undressed, its lardons limp with grease. This is not the burger you had hoped for, either. Its shape is too perfect, its meat too finely ground, its edges tough and chewy, its interior much too rare for a “medium” request. You don’t want to judge it by its looks, so you close your eyes, but that only makes it taste less like beef.
Foot-long Kobe beef hot dog wrapped in puff pastry. It sounds insane. Even with a serrated knife, actual muscle energy is required to slice it, its tough skin encasing meat that tastes like any other. An omelette arrives with no salt or pepper detectable in the heap of eggs and mushrooms, saddled up next to frites that smell and taste as though they have been living inside a vat of truffle oil, seeping grease as evidence. You take a bite of the omelette. It suggests that sometimes to eat something is to taste nothing at all.