Oh dear. I was really looking forward to this one. Ever since I walked by a couple of years ago and saw the adorable Chris Noth sitting in here having dinner, I’ve imagined I would get around to eating dinner at Thalia myself. Robby’s lived in a ‘hood proximate to the restaurant for years and has never eaten here either. So now we’ve tried it and – oh dear.
Restaurant week) has been extended to September 6th, so I was hunting around for a new spot and we were going to go to Marseilles, but I couldn’t get the reservation time there that we wanted, so when I saw the Thalia participating I figured we’d give it a try. The Restaurant week menu looked really inviting, so I e-mailed Robby and Kel and told them we were down.
Thalia is a pretty restaurant, no doubt about that. But the first disappointment isn’t really their fault – huge double-decker tour buses filled with tourists use their corner – 8th Ave and 50th, as a pickup and dump point. So as you’re sitting at your table, there’s about a 50% chance that your view will be completely taken up with huge, tacky, side-of-the-bus ads for daytime talk shows, Spiderman on Broadway, and the “Bodies” exhibition which is particularly unappetizing as you’re trying to have a meal. The crowd in there was also pretty tourist heavy, which I found surprising. Perhaps they got off the buses, saw the restaurant, and said, hell, why not?
I have to say, I started with a glass of vouvrey which made me very, very happy. The wine list in here is varied without being too vast, and they do have a lot of what I would consider trophy bottles on there. Nice for a celebration, should you be having one. But you’d want nice wine to go with excellent food, wouldn’t you? Well, we’re going to have to talk about that.
First of all, the menu they put together for Restaurant Week was no longer offered when we went in last night. They still had it posted on their website, and, to be fair, the ending date was July 25th. But be warned if you’re trying to do the Restaurant week thing proper, you have to book through the official website to make sure the restaurant you want is participating in the extended window. Or just call ahead.
Lucky for us, the Thalia (which the waiter kept pointedly pronouncing “Tah-lia”, as in Shire. From Rocky.) has a regular pre-theatre prix fixe as do most of the restaurants in the district. Unlucky for us, it was far more limited and far less interesting than the RW prix fixe had been. Even more unlucky for us, the food, was disappointing.
Robby started with a fricassee of mushrooms over some very nicely done polenta. Actually, quite good. The plate looked a little strange, as the polenta just sort of sat boldly naked in the middle of the plate with the mushroom mixture popped in each of four corners. I was going to eschew the polenta because my salmon was, reportedly, going to come with a barley-as-risotto component, and I wanted to keep the carbs down. Since the soup of the day was a creamy asparagus, which is too rich for me, I ordered the mesclun greens, which arrived formed into a very weird leaning-tower-of-leaves sitting on top of (and obscuring completely) some seriously over-marinated grape tomatoes. Not happy.
As for the entrees, I know a lot of food writers make it a point to order differently from their companions in order to give you a wider perspective. But, need I remind you, I’m not a food writer. I’m just me. So Robby and I both decided that given the choices, we’d both go for the salmon. The duxelles mushroom ravioli would have been a bad choice for Rob, as there’d already been a mushroom appetizer, and the chicken might have been nice, but I was rather afraid it might pale in comparison to the one at the West Bank I love so much. Judging by the plate of salmon, it quite possibly would have.
The salmon arrives, and there’s a lot going on on the plate for sure. The hunk of salmon was quite thick and large, and while I like salmon seared it was a tad bit on the sushi side even for me owing to it’s size. Rather than be confident that a good piece of fish is a good piece of fish, the chef gave me some sad bok choy that, again, I couldn’t see (what is with this guy obscuring his food with other food?), about a tablespoon of green barley “risotto” which wasn’t all that tasty and was kind of pudding-fied, and a couple of sauces that had one kind of acid (a sugary balsamic?) fighting with another kind of acid (a nice meyer lemon that was no match for either the big fish or the pink peppercorns sprinkled overmuch).
Dessert? This is where the big “oh dear” comes in. A lot of restaurants don’t have a lot of respect for dessert, and on the prix fixe they figure, well, they’ll take what they get. In this case, there were too traditionally heavy items. One was a carrot cake which, for me, was the lesser of the two heavy evils, and the other was a vanilla cheesecake – that traditional leaden cream-cheesed based thing that people seem to associate with New York just because of some guy named Lindy who’s long dead. This cheesecake was nothing you wouldn’t expect. No imagination applied to it. Barely a garnish. A berry or two, but not a “compote” you would consider respectable.
I chose the carrot cake, which, even if you’re not a huge carrot cake fan, you expect it to be moist at least because there are, well, carrots in it. This was not. You expect any dryness to be ameliorated by some frosting. There was none, though the menu did promise it – I got a bit of coconut foam instead. And there was no sign of a “cranberry confit” either – just a little melon-ball-sized scoop of gelato that was – was it vanilla? It wasn’t anything other than vanilla, that I can tell you. It was actually closer to cream-and-sugar flavor. As I’ve said, I only get to do dessert once a week, but I was not going to take this lying down so Robby and I shared a black-and-white cookie on the way home to make up for this depressing end to a very odd meal.
The service, I will say, was excellent. Tip your waiter nicely because they are awesome. Then again, you’re not going there on my recommendation because I’m just not making one. This seems to be one of the many restaurants in the area that do a prix fixe only grudgingly, because some of their patrons have theatre events to go to. There was no joy on either side of this transaction. Hope we have better luck next week.
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