I went to La Grande Boucherie for Restaurant Week lunch. This is a luxe outpost of a NYC place with 4 locations there as well as one in Chicago and one in Miami. The setting is superb:
It is a huge restaurant with two levels.
At face value, the RW menu looked like a really good deal. The mushroom ravioli dish I had was $28 on the regular menu, so for $7 more I get a starter and a dessert. How can you beat that?
The star of the meal was indeed the ravioli. It was exquisite and each bite tasted a bit different. Sometimes of fresh parsley, others of leek, and other times the wine in the sauce stood out.
The other two dishes added were not from the regular menu: a pate de campagne which was foie-forward and bit waxy and serviceable. Plus a grapefruit tart that was not as satisfying as just having a half a grapefruit.
The problem here was the chaos with ridiculously slow service. I spent 1 hour 45 minutes here. Lots of people waited a long time for a table, even though it looked like they had plenty of room to seat people. The bar seats are hard and uncomfortable. There was a kind of cold, corporate feeling to the entire experience. I wish I hadn’t come.
