Cecelia pushed so many of my buttons. Heavy silver, cloth napkins, Amy Winehouse’s You Know I’m No Good playing in the soft light of a very stormy afternoon.
Plenty of intriguing wall art, even in the men’s room. Exotic craft cocktails.
And the Skillet Cornbread with Maple Bourbon Glaze and Cinnamon Butter was all that, even though the server poured the glaze over the bread without asking me if I wanted her to. I guess you could call that fajita style.
Unfortunately, on your first visit to a place, you’ve no way to tell whether any food problems are concept/recipe oriented or just a lack of kitchen talent at that key moment when you place your order. I tend to hit places at the beginning of a shift or shift change because that’s the eating pattern that works best for me, and I’m also a firm believer that if the doors are open, you should definitely have your shit together, so not having the A-team on hand has never been a valid excuse for me. If the doors are open and you are charging money, someone–cook, server, manager–needs to oversee quality and make sure the food comes out right. I got the Fried Green Tomatoes with Crawfish in White Remoulade as an appetizer, and followed with the Flounder Meunière .
If you look closely, you can see that although both dishes are beautifully presented, neither is “wet” enough. There’s barely enough white remoulade for the crawfish tails, let alone the fried tomatoes or spring mix they are stacked on. And there wasn’t really enough meunière sauce to coat the pasteurized lump crabmeat, let alone accent the corn meal crusted flounder. Individually, all the components except the crabmeat were very good, but the lack of sauce in both dishes eliminated any chance of harmony. So is this a recipe problem, or a personnel problem? No way to know. Don’t let it scare you off from drinks and the decadent skillet cornbread, but I for one, will wait for a very compelling special advertised on Facebook before I go back to give them a second, and possibly last chance.