Restaurant Week 1 - Artisinal - not recommended

I love cheese...I used to make pilgrimages to the Beverly Hill Cheese Store when I lived in Santa Monica just to pick up various cheese for the week. Artisinal seemed like a great fit for Restaurant Week, with this well-advertised cheese cave and incredible selection of cheese and wine parings. One problem:

THERE WAS NO CHEESE ON THE RESTAURANT WEEK MENU.

What? No cheese? OK, fine. So my friend and I decided to order off the regular menu, giving into the classic restaurant week dupe. Oh well. What ensued, however, was not worth the money we spent. Not in the least. The best thing was the bread basket.

The restaurant itself has a Parisian bistro feel, various sized tables on a tile floor. Fairly large but with a lot of people packed in. We were sat at a two top, where, when I sat on the booth, I was nearly chin-level with the table. Get a better cushion.

When our waiter came to take our order, I tried for a glass of Prosecco. No go. So he recommended the next one on the menu - a 'champagne' he said, that was listed from New Mexico. OK, so I'm not a wine connoisseur, but I would kind of expect that the name champagne would be highly reserved for French options in a French bistro!

For dinner we ordered the tuna carpaccio, salads (Mesculun greens for me, beet for my friend), and an array of four cheeses. When we ordered the cheeses, the waiter told us that they would substitute if any were out. OK, that's fine. I also asked for a bit of honey with the cheese - not the honey and walnut combo but just honey. If you have never had honey on sheep's milk cheese, btw, try it. So good. Anyway, on this Monday at 7 p.m., he was unsure they had it.

My salad was little more than some bagged greens coated in nondescript dressing plopped in a white Crate & Barrel like salad bowl. Literally, no cheese, no single unique touch, no nothing. For $9.50. I could have made better in my apartment for less than $1. The beet salad, I think, was better and included a chunk of creamy goat cheese, but still. Totally disappointed. The tuna carpaccio...eh. Not bad, not great. It lost some of the great flavor of the fish by being drowned in whatever marinade they used, which was a little on the oily side.

The cheese, in all truth, wasn't bad...it was more the confusion that I had over it that was frustrating. According to the waiter, they only substituted one, but when I was handed the guide to what we had on our tray, only one of them was the same name as what I had ordered. The only thing I can think of is that they have different variants of similar cheeses that are, in essence the same. We got a bowl of nuts with a drizzle of honey, after which we asked for more honey, thank goodness they had it.

OK, so not great food experience, but compounding it was the fact that it was no less than 80 degrees in the restaurant. My friend and I were both sweating, and the waiters running around were all red-faced and dripping. Turn up the AC!! It was cooler after we stepped out of the restaurant than inside.

All in all, I felt that the food was overpriced for what it was. Not even sure it tasted that good. Go to a cheese shop (maybe even Artisinal's retail store?) and make a tray at home - you'll enjoy it more and save some dough.

Til next post....