Happy Noms

Authors: Victor and Monty
Restaurant: Gordon Ramsay at The London
Exec Chef: Markus Glocker

Date: February 20, 2013
Dinner

Victor’s Notes:

(Gordon Ramsay actually sold his share in this restaurant due to financial problems in November 2009. You can read about it here.)

I’ve been holding off on trying Gordon Ramsey’s NYC fine-dining restaurant for a while now because I’ve heard that the London one is really similar but better. A third friend wanted to try this, though, so we just went ahead and tried it.

Matt and I got the normal tasting menu, while Monty got the vegetable tasting menu. I don’t really have pictures of the vegetable tasting, but he can provide some general comments on it.

There were a few service issues. First, the waiters at times looked like they were struggling to remember the ingredients; one waiter even said that she had to go back to check. Second, there were two times when they gave us the food and described it while a friend was in the restroom. Third, the staff rarely smiled—they looked like they disliked their job.

I saw a proposal for the second time in a week! (I saw one six days ago at Per Se.) The guy basically went around and got on one knee to ask, and it was superrrrrr cute!

Anyway, Monty’s got a bunch of thoughts about this experience and the restaurant, and I’ll let him go into detail on that. I generally agree with his thoughts here.

Monty’s Notes: My only real note about this restaurant is that the bathroom doors are tricky to lock. Make sure they’re locked. Our friend won the second most-unfortunate-event award by walking in on someone in the bathroom (the most-unfortunate-event award goes to the person he walked in on). So lock the door carefully. Onto my general thoughts….

I really love food in general. If you’re familiar with my thoughts on this blog, you know that it’s easy for me to enjoy a dish because I just love food that much. Here though, I didn’t love it. In fact, I disliked it – mainly because of the price factor.

I don’t want to get all Tad-like but when you really splurge, you want to preferably be treated like royalty (burger king gives out the paper crowns) and be fed like royalty. For me, if the service is less than par, that’s ok if the food is amazing – food comes first. Here, most unfortunately, both failed. The food is uninspiring, boring, and forgettable. The ambience of the restaurant was quite stuffy and the waitstaff had the outward appearance of someone doing a chore – I’ve seen much warmer smiles from people at Chilis. Btw, people at Chilis or Chevys or other chain restaurants generally have a fat smile plastered on their face. It’s quite welcoming :)

SO I’m going to channel a more critical persona, as much as I hate speaking ill about food. It’s just nefarious to charge people an entire paycheck for mediocre food. Do NOT charge $30/dish and have one of those dishes be a “potato rosti.” I can go to McDonalds and get a hashbrown of comparable quality but twice the size for 99 cents.

Click here to see pictures of our meal.

Author: Victor and Jessie (yay, a guest blogger!)
Restaurant: Eleven Madison Park
Exec Chef: Daniel Humm
Website: http://elevenmadisonpark.com/

Date: April 7, 2013
Dinner: Mom’s Visit Meal #3!

Victor’s Notes:

As some of you know, my mom and my cousin visited me last weekend, and I decided to show her some of my favorite fine dining restaurants in the city. This is stop #3 of 4: Eleven Madison Park! (Unfortunately, the second post about Jungsik isn’t really ready yet, but I think I’ll just go ahead and publish this one. We’ll have another EMP post soon enough, so this will spread it out more.)

It got dark around the time we had the seventh course (brook trout), so the pics get considerably worse from then on. I’ll have better pics in the next EMP post; Monty’s taking me there for lunch ^___^!

Click here to see pictures of the amazing meal!