This place gets a lot of good reviews, and a fair mount of poor ones too. I believe this is a factor of the transiency of food services... people come, people go, and it's really the people (employees) that are ultimately responsible for the impressions made upon the customer. For us, the impression was that of an overbearing and surly server, combined with a turned bottle of wine that Empire's so-called somallier was forcefully hesitant to accept as "turned". Our experiences with fine dining and good wine (literallly around the world) told us otherwise but, nonetheless, the somellier should have -- as a professional -- bucked up and gotten us a better bottle. After all, is customer service about arguing with the customer? Appearently, at Second Empire, it may well be. We'll give the place another try in a year or so (there are so many other places in the area now), and perhaps things will have improved. After all, it's all about the service, isn't it?
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