Café Presse review no. 2

I got my Wish –Café Presse tripped up in her kicky little shoes and hit us in the gut.

If Betty has made the best Steak Frites ever, Café Press has just served the worst.

Café Presse will now go down in the Cannella/Young history of eating out as serving the worst Steak Frites we have ever had.

Ever.

Since Erik is a chef and I tend to take the side of the restaurant in these matters (in this case, it is a restaurant owned, managed and frequented by people that I have dined with) we are both forgiving of the occasional meal gone awry… but our meal was markedly bad in every way (except the wine).

Steak Frites is a simple dish: fries, beef cooked medium rare and a reduction sauce drizzled about–that is it.

Our steak was cold and raw on the inside. We would have complained, but our server had an errand to run or a forest fire to single-handedly put out and we were left alone to overhear Chef Drohman’s catering conversation and pick at the bloody, untrimmed lump of $16 food-that-proved-to-hate-us.

I am surprised the dish was even allowed out of the kitchen–especially with the chef/owner in the house.

To take equal ownership of the meal, we should have gotten up and sought out Ester–the manager. We should have sent the meal back as soon as it landed. We should not have picked at the edges of the meat until we were properly disgusted. But we failed on all accounts.

Will we be back? Proba-freakn-ly. Cheap salads and wine help to encourage that. Good friends who frequent the place will be a draw as well. But fluffy-ducks-on-fire: THAT meal sucked kittens out of a sewer pipe.