Month: August 2005

reservations, whatever

I’ve had some pretty memorable meals at Matt’s in the Market over the years. This place is a local favorite and the devotion is well deserved. The place mixes a simple, but expertly prepared, menu with a relaxed and mellow atmosphere and an informal and friendly staff.

Two pieces of advice:
1) Check the menu before sitting down. Their menu is ever changing, but it is also quite small. You might find that there isn’t anything you want to eat after waiting to sit down.
2) Don’t bother with reservations. They will happily take your reservations, but they will also quite happily seat someone who walks in without reservations before you if they are there first. This happened to us recently. We walked in behind this couple who didn’t have reservations and they were seated at the last open table. We then had to wait 20 minutes to be offered seats at the bar.

This is not a cheap dinner, but you’ll pay the bill with a smile on your face.

Zoe has been garnering a ton of hype and I’m happy to report that it is well deserved. The food was unique, the ingredients fresh, the service excellent, the dishes well prepared but not self-conscious or over complicated. This is a great special occasion restaurant or more often (if you can afford it). The only detraction is that the room can be quite noisy, but it never got to the level of other places we’ve been to where we had to shout to hear each other.

If you’ve read my other posts in this category, you’ll know that I’m pretty picky. I heartily recommend Zoe.

feh

The Friday Harbor House restaurant in Friday Harbor (San Juan Island, WA) shows that good service and fresh ingredients can still produce an average meal. This isn’t such a horrible thing in itself, but when you are charging 4 star prices, serving 2 star food is unacceptable. Also when you are charging 4 star prices, maybe having a little bit of a dress code is ok. The woman sitting next to us in flip flops, a ratty tank top and gym shorts did not make us feel any better about our meal.

Avoid this place.

Amazing, but marred by a nearly fatal flaw

The line out the door (which is nearly constant during business hours) is emblematic of two things. First, the pastries and breads are simply amazing. Secondly, the counter staff sucks. Well, sucks is a bit of an overstatement. Some of them can be outright rude, but some are hampered by the weird setup of their retail area. The pastries are in a display case and on shelves where there is only room for one person. This means that there are often two or three people standing behind the counter doing nothing, while one is filling the order of someone in line. This is sometimes really frustrating for you as a customer because this place tends to attract people who will just stand there gawking at the items for sale, unable to make up their minds even though they have been standing next to that same counter for 10 minutes waiting. On multiple occasions, I have stopped by the shop feeling lucky that there was only one or two people in line and still spent 15 minutes waiting to order my muffin because the person in front of me wanted to know the ingredients of each thing in the case and what each tasted like and then wanted to pay by check. This is why many coffee places now have two cash registers, so that people like me who just want a large drip don’t have to wait behind the person ordering 12 different, complicated, drinks for their entire office. Macrina probably won’t bother to make a change like this because they don’t have to. Their food is good enough that even I (who hates lines) will wait for it, but they would be even more amazing if they could solve their customer service issues.