A few weeks ago, Mark and I went to Pairings to celebrate our anniversary. Every year we usually go to La Scala in Little Italy (downtown), where we had our rehearsal dinner. However, I'm not working downtown anymore, so we decided to stay local.
The concept of Pairings is that they have an extensive wine selection that you can pair with your food. The restaurant came highly recommended from a former co-worker of mine, so I thought we would have a great time. I thought wrong.
When we went to the restaurant on a Wednesday night, there were only two other parties in the entire restaurant. The restaurant itself is small and set up in a way that does not correlate to its overpriced food.
Since this restaurant had an extensive wine selection, you would have thought the server would make recommendations. Nope. She stood there with a sourpuss on her face as I asked about the different wine samplers. I opted for a traditional Sauvignon Blanc and Mark had a glass of Pinot Noir.
Mark and I both ordered cream of crab soup ($8/each). The soup came with one, yes one, lump of crab. They actually put it on your spoon and point it out. Ummm odd. Hello, we're in Maryland, it's crab season and you're giving us cream of crab that has one lump of crabmeat in it?
I continued the crab trend by ordering the crab cake ($25). Yes that's singular, one cake. In reality, it looked like it was the only thing I would like on the menu aside from the steak. My crab cake came with some fennel slaw (no thanks) and sweet potato fries (okay). What an overpriced meal. The crab cake was small and burnt on the bottom. The taste of the unburnt portions was okay...but really, $25 for that?!?! I could get a bigger crab cake for that price in DC.
Mark opted for a salad with seared tuna ($9.5 I think). The tuna was decent according to Mark, but the rest of the salad was horrible. It was saturated in soy sauce...yes soy sauce was apparently the dressing (not described as such on the menu).
At this point we chose not to get dessert. Our servers were ignoring us despite us being right there in their view. They opted to spend more time cleaning up their bar and talking to the other two tables (I guess they were regulars). It seemed like torture for the one server to refill my water glass.
Having been a server at many restaurants and one country club, I can empathize with servers when they're in the weeds...I can't empathize when they just provide crappy service.
Overall, what a horrible, overrated, and overpriced way to spend an anniversary. We will never go back. There are better places to go to and we wish we had, but you have to try new places.
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