When a Chef Acts Like a Schm*ck

I know you’re saying to yourself: “Plotnicki used a provocative title in order to get attention." While I admit that the thought crossed my mind, given the story I am about to tell, I think that it’s an accurate description of the subject at hand. In fact I’ll say it again: David Myers, the chef/owner of the restaurant Sona, is a schmuck. In fact after you hear the story I am about to tell about him, what other way could one describe him?

Over the past few years, Mrs. P and I have spent the weekend of her birthday in Los Angeles. During past years we had gone to a number of terrific restaurants, ranging from Providence to Bastide (when Ludo was there) to Il Grano. This year, because of the demands of the OA Dining Survey, our meal schedule ended up with three sushi meals and a small plates affair at The Bazaar which left Sona as the only traditional dinner. While I don’t mind dining in that manner, Mrs. P doesn’t have the same level of tolerance so when we got to the restaurant and opened our menus, she let out a sigh of relief and said, “finally, real food." I was happy for her as it was her actual birthday and she had been complaining about her meals. Finally she had a chance to be satisfied.

The first thing that struck us about the menu was how ingredient driven it seemed. There was a Chino Farms corn soup, an heirloom tomato dish, and tasty looking dishes revolving around Maine lobster, sweet breads and pork belly. There was also what they called the Menu Spontenee, but that meant the kitchen chose your menu and there were so many good looking dishes on the ala carte menu that we didn’t want to take the chance that we wouldn’t get to eat them.

When our waitress took our order, we asked her if we could organize our own tasting menu. We rattled off a half dozen dishes that we wanted and she went off to speak to the chef. She returned ten minutes later telling us it was a no go and that “the chef is in a foul mood." She went on to tell us that we could either order the Menu Spontenee, or order the dishes we wanted ala carte and split them. I probed the issue a bit and she went on to give us a speech about how the chefs go to the market each morning where they choose the ingredients for the Menu Spontenee so it is “really important to them."

Well okay, now I’m not exactly a stranger to this business of having the kitchen choose your meal. In fact, if you read this blog, it’s a policy that I typically subscribe to so I told the waitress we would be happy to go along with that program. But I added, if there is anyway the chef can work some of the dishes we wanted to order into the Menu Sponentee that would be great. She asked me which dishes were important to us and I told her, the corn soup, the risotto and the pork belly. Off she went for a second time only to return a few seconds later in order to sell us another dish: “I forgot to tell you about the special tonight - foie gras with potato ice cream and raspberry gastrique (I’m not sure if that was the exact dish but you get the drift) to which I responded, “that sounds great and you can add that as a seventh course."

The weirdness began with the very first course which was the corn soup. But instead of the soup being served with a biscuit, it had been replaced by a large cube of pork belly. Now ordinarily that would have been fine except that one of the other dishes that we asked for off the ala carte menu was the pork belly. The next dish was a white, flaky fish (I forget the exact species) in a Thai-style lemongrass/coconut milk broth. Not only was the fish significantly overcooked, but Mrs. P is not a fan of the style so we pretty much left the dish over. Much to my surprise, nobody commented that we hardly touched our food. Then duck arrived at our table and at that point I had it.

I called our waitress over and asked her why the duck was our third course. She explained that the menu was four savory dishes and two desserts. Which meant, in addition to not getting the dishes that we wanted, we were also not going to get as much food as we wanted to eat. By this point I had had it and I picked the dish up off of the table and held it out and said to the waitress, “Take this back I don’t want to eat this." In fact even the usually reserved Mrs. P was complaining. At this point the waitress freaked and she went to get the manager who plopped himself down on the banquet beside me trying to calm things down.

After chatting for about ten minutes where we spoke about everything from where we lived to the various restaurants we had been to etc., he apologized; calling the whoie thing a miscommunication, and he said that had he been aware of the problem at the beginning of the meal it wouldn’t have happened. He asked us which dishes we specifically wanted, and since we already had the corn soup with pork belly in it, I told him the risotto and the foie gras special, and the kitchen could send out whatever course they liked for our final savory course. He went off to the kitchen and he returned a few minutes later to tell us that the kitchen was with the program.

Now I know you’re going to find this hard to believe but, after all of that, which included the manager returning and telling us we would get what we want, the kitchen refused to change their behavior. Sure we were served risotto, but similar to what had happened with the corn soup, the Maine lobster was replaced with Bay Scallops. And the foie gras special that we asked for, and which our waitress went out of her way to sell us, never appeared. Instead, the kitchen served duck as a main course and a few slices of sautéed foie accompanied the duck. Of course we ended up with 6 course and not the 7 we asked for.

What made the whole thing even sillier was that in the end, the only thing spontaneous about the Menu Spontenee was that David Myers moved the ingredients from one dish to another. Now what on earth is artistic, about taking the pork belly that is featured in a pork belly dish you are serving on the ala carte menu and sticking it in the middle of a bowl of corn soup instead of a biscuit? Is that really artistry and what does it have to do with sourcing special ingredients from the daily market? And why replace the Maine lobster with Bay Scallops in the risotto? Was there really an artistic reason to make that switch? And why couldn’t we eat the foie gras special that the waitress sold us, which was the most interesting sounding dish on the menu. Why did we have to eat foie with our duck breast instead?

Now I’m all in favor of chefs being artists, and I would never dream of going to the French Laundry and ordering Oysters and Pearls and asking the kitchen to replace the oysters with clams or shrimp. But on the other hand, I am fairly certain that Thomas Keller would never decide to spontaneously replace the oysters with pork belly either. Oysters and pearls is art, it’s the Mona Lisa of American cuisine. But the mere fact that David Myers replaced the biscuit in his corn soup with an ingredient from a dish that was on the days ala carte menu, is the proof that Myers merely serves food that is prepared with a high level of culinary technique, but it does not rise to the level of art.

In the end we had paid hundreds of dollars for a dinner where we didn’t get to eat a single dish that we asked for, and where the kitchen refused to change their behavior even after we complained about it and the manager told us it would be fixed,. Even worse, my wife’s birthday had been ruined. After telling the story to a number of friends, some of whom are chefs at important restaurants, the comments ranged from “what an asshole" to “Myers is notorious for being the most arrogant chef around." And while those descriptions might be accurate, I think I prefer my own conclusion. David Myers is a schmuck.

11/19/2009 | Comments (6) | Sona, Chino Farms, Il Grano, David Myers, Providence