You have assumed what you want to prove – that I “misordered”.
“two out of four ain’t bad” – but I can do so much better here than that.
Agreed. Though in any restaurant there are some dishes that are better than others, if they are on the menu they had better be good, or they shouldn’t be there at all. Similar to the argument that one may have had an “off night”. A really good restaurant does not (or at least should not) have “off-nights”. As far as the chicken argument goes, if a restaurant is offering chicken it should be every bit as good as the other dishes.
Sorry, I was just going by what you said: that you like your “superior” chicken best, but that you take suprême de voilaille because you love that, but what you ordered was not that. And, you said you did not care for the clams because the broth tasted “musty.” I thought that might be the fish sauce (often described something like that), but if you meant something different, forgive me! It wasn’t a criticism to have ordered things not to your liking, but rather an encouragement that perhaps there would have been other dishes that you would have liked better like the “delicious” broccoli and the “spicy and flavorsome” raviolis. It is true that at some restaurants that every dish is appealing, but depending on your own particular tastes, this is certainly not always the case. Non?
In my 3 or 4 experiences at Le Servan over the years, the menu has been different each time. Very occasionally a dish I have ordered does not appeal to my palate but usually gets an enthusiastic reaction from other(s) at my table. Chacun son truc and not a reason to condemn a restaurant, especially one with such an enjoyable vibe as Le Servan. Maybe if the one or two disapp ,2wnl;ointing dishes becomes a pattern in subsequent meals, yes, off my list. But this does not seem to be the case here.
As for the wine at Le Servan, I only order by the glass and let the waiter do the choosing to match the food. Never been disappointed.
Re chicken, the “poulet rôti de ma grand-mère au jus” at Lazare in the 8th gets my vote. And great price/ quality ratio. But Sunday only.
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The chicken dish was well prepared, it just was not interesting – one more ingredient of some kind could have turned it into an inspired dish. But as @rrems says, if it goes on the menu, it better be good.
I also continue to have a problem with restaurants that care so little about their customers that they are willing to give poor or even flawed wines to them. It’s not like there is such a limited selection out there that they can’t find anything else. As I have pointed out, most of the restaurants that serve only natural wines have cleaned up their act, but not Le Servan, and in fact it was the wine issue, not the food, that had led me to stop going there in the first place.
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I would point out that we spent 89€ on the meal. Of that, we liked two dishes, for a total of 30€. How many of you would return to a restaurant with that type of track record?
Quite apart from food issues, your report about the “natural” wines by the glass offerings is independently sufficient reason for us to strike this place from our list. (After our recent fourth visit to appropriately named Sauvage, we’ve crossed it off our list for the same reason.) And so for this we thank you — our list is long enough already.
I agree here wholeheartedly with @ParnParis, and that if I had experienced the misses at the place as a “track record,” of course that would be a different story. This just has not been my experience at Servan, quite the opposite (I think I had a very similar chicken dish on my first visit and thought it excellent). And I perhaps read about your experiences incorrectly. I am certainly appreciative of your greater knowledge of the wine situation. I have recently clipped one of your reviews of Burgundy whites (and reds), as I have several different bottles from that vineyard, and was going to try and pay attention to the differences among the bottles next time I open one of them as I reread your descriptions.
I feel that often you and I are looking at different things (perhaps) in a restaurant, and I think your perspective is often very illuminating to me about why I liked or didn’t like something. In this case, I just thought that really you might have liked some of the dishes you did not order better than the ones you did. (And that perhaps those dishes that you didn’t care for weren’t objectively bad, just not either what you expected or not to your taste for reasons of flavors that didn’t sit well on your palate).
Anyway, I get it, I would absolutely not return to a restaurant that felt ho hum to me either!
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Different people look for different things in a restaurant and weight them differently. That’s normal.
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