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l’Os à Table – We arrive at this highly-recommended restaurant in the mood for an interesting dinner, or at least one better than we had at lunch. The setting is nice (well outside town), the room is comfortable, and the customers…are absent. All night, there’s only one other occupied table, and the resulting funereal hush is a little depressing. And while there are obvious pretensions to high quality in the sophistication of the dining instruments, the descriptions on the menu, and so forth, the restaurant completely fails to deliver on its promises. A pile of smoked salmon to start is fine, though it says little about the chef’s skills, but the pigeonneau that follows is livery (from an unmentioned forcemeat) and somewhat overwhelmed by an ultra-rich, foie gras-laden sauce. The overall effect is of too much liver with a bird that’s already on the gamy side. Theresa’s salade de chèvre chaud is boring, with stale toasts the only ingredient to provide any actual “interest,” and her somewhat bizarre chocolate-coated rabbit is cooked to the consistency of thread, with about as much taste. At least the bread is good, though it’s then difficult to understand what happened to its cousins in the salad...

The wine list appears interesting enough, but they’re out of a lot of the listed bottles. Worse, they decant the wine I do order far from the table (why, when there’s no one here?), pour some for each of us, then spirit the decanter back across the room. Where it sits, full of wine…while our glasses soon become, and then remain, empty. We wait. We do some significant head-swirling, even take pointed sips at otherwise empty glasses whenever a waiter passes. No effect. Finally, I take matters into my own hands and bring the decanter to our table. Unlike at Troisgros a few years back, in which every waiter in the place twitched with shame when I was forced into a similar action after a too much time bereft of wine, no one here seems to care. And in fact, our waitress does act as if she has been whipped…more than once, and to the point where she seems to expect it again at the end of her shift.

This restaurant is, alas, just no fun at all. (10/06)