Happy to have a new place in the area and looking forward to stopping in for some drinks and a bite at the bar. Seth always takes good care of us at Alden & Harlow. However a bit disappointed to see some of the price points on the opening menu, e.g. $74 for a whole roasted chicken? ummmmmm…I can walk a block to Cafe Sushi and have their entire omakase for the same price. Hell, if I want a roast chicken that badly, Branch Line’s excellent whole green circle bird is half the price of the Waypoint dish. I feel like I am getting punked with some of the prices recently opened places are trying to pass off.
that is brutal. no thanks!
Yikes. Maybe it’s a turkey …
Side note: glad someone else is balking at a Boston menu price … it has to stop at some point.
There are some crazy prices on that menu. I can’t imagine they’ll stay that high, or they will be out of business really fast. As my co-worker just said, that’s the epi-pen of chicken.
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I hope that chicken was fed pure gold. Yikes. I’ll take a pass.
My wife said that she assumed it was a typo, but then she saw the $34 veggie platter.
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Beyond ridiculous, even with “liver jus”. I’ll never go, take the trek to Branch Line instead, their chicken is amazing. And for a vegetables, go to Sarma (their often offered fried chicken is delicious, and I don’t even like fried chicken.)
Some menu prices look somehow reasonable but the “roast” part is crazy (and I thought the cauliflower at Branchline was good but alreadyquite overpriced…)
At that price point, it would have to ensure someone poops the gold back out to make it worth the price.
I’m not one to typically order roast chicken when I eat out anyway.
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My wife looked at the Waypoint website online menu, and the chicken is now priced at $54, and the vegetables around $28-30.
Still even at $59 it is still overpriced - at more and more restaurants it is better to order more of the appetizers/small plates which often seemed to be priced reasonable (including Waypoint) and skip entrees which are more and more way overpriced (you often only get the meat or fish around $30-40 and still have to order some side dishes which end the entrees $40-50)
Yes, we stopped in the other night and some the menu prices have definitely been adjusted. That said, I still found it a bit overpriced. Some dishes such as the aforementioned roasts are still expensive (post adjustment), and some portions (e.g. king crab) are quite small. This price to portion slight of hand was also apparent at Little Donkey on my 2nd visit. I’m not a person who needs huge portions, but I do need a fair portion for the price. Don’t call a dish peel & eat shrimp and then serve 8 medium sized shrimp, you are setting a customer up for disappointment.
At the end of the day though I wouldn’t gripe about pricing if the food blew me away. However it just did not. My fear for this place, based on the richness of Alden and Harlow is that they would take fresh seafood and over complicate it. Unfortunately that is exactly what we experienced with the food. I prefer fresh King Crab to lobster; under no circumstances does it need brown butter added. Likewise, lobster meat does not need to be served in a bone marrow bath. The tuna crudo was a beautiful dish, however the flavor of the fish was hard to discern among the seasoning and sauce. I prefer fresh, simple seafood (less is more). The dishes at Waypoint are just too unnecessarily complicated for my taste. Hopefully enough people feel the same way and they listen as they seem to have done on menu prices and simplify some of the preparations a bit. I don’t mean to imply the food is bad, it certainly isn’t. Rather it’s just not to my personal taste.
Overall the space breathtaking, if quite loud. Service at the bar was excellent as expected. The staff handled the new opening crowd quite well. I can see this being a very nice place for drinks with a dozen oysters on quiet nights in the winter. I’m sure I will find a few other dishes I like as I am a fan of Alden & Harlow.
Yeah, the mocktails are $8. That’s a bit much for a non-alcoholic beverage. Just double-checked to make sure I’m not out of touch- Sarma’s are $4, 5 or 6.
We met friends at Waypoint for a quick drink last night, no food. Cocktails and bar service were great.
Despite not eating one thing we noticed was that for the 2nd time, chef was not in the house. This was our 2nd visit (both on weekends) in their 3 weeks of being open. I can’t even use having to tend to Alden and Harlow as an excuse, as staff confirmed that he was elsewhere on both occasions. This is something that really raises a red flag for me. I tend to enjoy places that are chef driven in that the chef is in house working to make every meal excellent. In 2 decades of dining at Hammersleys regularly, I never went in once when chef was not in the kitchen. Not coincidentally I never had a bad meal there. Whether at Kirkland or Craigie, I feel like chef Maws is there every time somehow…
It’s disappointing.
Do you really expect the CEO of a company to be running the company everyday from his/her office ? A strength of a good leader (and a chef who owns more than just one restaurant isn’t any longer “just” a chef but also a business leader) is delegation of his/her vision to a team he/she carefully selected. It would be nice if a chef is everyday in the kitchen but that is very unrealistic. Today being a good chef means a being a good people manager who knows how to hire the right people eho have the ability to cook on the same level as the chef. In a good restaurant you eon’t know if the chef is in the kitchen or not based on the consistency. (and this week is Feast Portland, so many chefs from around the country are there)
It’s a small sample size, but personally, I would hope the head chef in a high priced chef driven restaurant is in the house and refining the operation on more than half of the weekend nights in its first month in operation. As a CEO myself I can tell you from experience that handing the reigns to an able team comes once the operation in humming, not during launch.
Waypoint is local to me, and I want to it to be a solid option. Thus the high expectations.
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Missing in Action for the opening weeks? How very Guy Fieri.
In comparing a Chef to a CEO, is proper credit being given to the head of front of house operations? Beverage program? Based on the crowd and alcohol prices, food is likely around 60% of sales, max 65% for the operation (obviously estimates). Is the Chef overseeing/directing wine selections? Cocktail development? Perhaps he does as the beer markup seems similar to the chicken price gouging.
I simply feel that there are certain assumptions being made as to the hierarchical structure, as if a chef is the top of the pyramid with all operations under their umbrella, which is extraordinarily rare, particularly for a small name chef. For this chef in particular, it may be dangerous to make assumptions as to their level of control. His involvement with Naco Taco = fool me once…
Heck, Gordon was even working brunch the one time that we went!
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Normally a chef wouldn’t be compared to a CEO more to a CSO but with Waypoint the chef is also the owner and it that case the CEO analogy works
I understand your point but in today’s world of chefs with multiple restaurants this won’t work anymore. Also the BOH should be up and running quite sometime before opening of the restaurant in terms of execution if they ate well hired - once the restaurant opens the FOH needs often more time to adjust/improve.
