I don't know whether to be more upset with the restaurant or the people who have given this place good reviews. The ambience is not bad, though the room was a bit drafty and cold, even on an abnormally warm January night. That's about the most positive thing I can say, other than the fact that we did pick a good half bottle of wine to accompany what turned out to be a abominable dining experience. The wine plate which featured different cheeses, olives, and salumi, etc. was decent as well. There...that's about it for the positives.
My wife ordered a spinach salad and the beef tenderloin, I ordered the apple and fennel salad and the pork shank. After our appetizer and requisite bread and oil (which was taken away with our permission, then, inexplicably returned 10 minutes later), our meal began, much to our surprise, with the main entrée. The waiter had either forgotten to submit the salad orders or the kitchen forgot to prepare them. The waiter's response when we told him was one of complete surprise, as if he couldn't recall that we had ever ordered anything.
We told him to forget the salads and we began to dissect our food. My wife's ""fanned"" potato was both cold and at least a day old, judging by the texture. A better potato can be found at Wendy's. The tenderloin was a decent cut, but so incredibly undercooked that the center was actually cold and slimy red...she had requested medium. The waiter even noted this, saying, ""that doesn't look medium"" on one of his passes through. We were pretty much done with this place by this time, so she ate around the center and called it good. My pork shank was an overcooked bone with a few flanges of edible meat, seasoned to make it perhaps more bland than it would have been otherwise. The shank sat on a bed of bland potatoes (I think they were to be garlic mashed, but couldn't taste anything, really), with a sauce that came right off the Sysco truck. We had to order another half-bottle of wine just to get through the rest of the meal.
To top it off, we ordered a strawberry shortbread dessert (with whipped cream and balsamic coated strawberries...that was the description in the menu, anyway, yes, we should have known better by this time). The shortbread actually took the form of boxed shortbread cookies right out of the box. The whipped cream was Readiwhip...right out of the can and the strawberries were still half-frozen and fresh out of the same Sysco truck that must have dropped everything else off along with the bitter coffee that accompanied the dessert.
Seldom do we go out to eat on a date night..almost never, and feel that we wasted our money...we wasted our money at Domacin. Don't make the same mistake.
more