Bistro Calais
Nestled in the Upper Kirby District area on Bammel (just west of Kirby off of Westheimer) is the cute Bistro Calais. One of the waiters used to work at Cafe Rabelais so first impressions were good. What wasn't good was a nearly empty restaurant at 8:00 on a Wednesday night. In front, they have tables they seem to never use except at brunch on the weekends. Instead, they take you to the back part of the restaurant that overlooks the courtyard.
They serve traditional French cuisine at Cafe Rabelais prices--reasonable. Rekha started her soup and salad dinner with french onion soup--one word--YUCKKKKK! The chef added too much vinegar. I had the duck confit. Quite good even if the fig marmelade was clearly from a can. The french fries also had a good crisp and didn't appear to be steeped in old oil.
The restaurant has potential. But we've been here twice in a few months and they ave yet to fulfill that potential. We'll try again in a few months. If they don't figure it out by then, they'll never figure it out.
1 Comments:
You hit the mark on Bistro Calais - a group of 4 of us tried it about 6 weeks ago on Saturday evening around 8pm - the back dinning room was only half full and yet they were out of all of the specials of the day and several of the regular menu items. What we did order was not particularly good; one item was overcooked on the outside and yet cold on the inside (as if it had been precooked,put in the cooler and then put under the broiler for a few minutes to warm up when it was ordered. Service was slow, but maybe that was due to the fact that they were new, but we were brought the wrong wine bottle twice and finally when the waiter came back with a 3rd bottle that was not the one that we had ordered from the wine list (not just the wrong year - wrong wine completely - Merlot instead of Bourdeaux; well I guess it was red anyway); the waiter finally said we don't have the wine you ordered and tried to push the more expensive Merlot on us - we declined.
Hopefully they will get better - they seemed to not really care about a table of 4 when they had several tables of 6 in the dinning room.
I have since re-discovered Cafe Rablais and prefer it much more.
August 17, 2005
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