dinner at megu midtown

Last night we celebrated my dear friend Gaea's birthday at Megu Midtown. Most of us had this on our "Restaurants to Try" list so we were pretty excited. But frankly, it was largely a let-down. Service was extremely slow, inattentive and rather unrefined. At the prices they charge, you would think the servers would be trained to put dishes in front of the person that ordered it. Half of our party had at one point worked in restaurants so the fact that they failed to do such a basic thing really irked us. Two people splurged on the Omakase but did not seem to find it worthy of the $180 pricetag (See Pattie's recap of the Omakase at her scrumptious blog, A Slice of Pattie). For me, the only noteworthy things served were:

1. The uni and quail egg sushi. I have not had uni since coming back from my Tokyo trip out of fear that I would just be incredibly disappointed at the quality of uni served here. But the uni at Megu was absolutely fresh and devoid of that fishy taste. It was just silky and delicious, and the creamy taste was enhanced beautifully by the quail egg yolk. Just YUM. It's $11 for just one piece but well worth it if you worship uni as much as we do.
 
2. The Megu Kobe Beef Slices “Ishiyaki” ($34), which you grill on a hot river stone yourself. This  was pretty darn good. The meat was incredibly soft and really needed no flavoring. I subtract a few points though because the waiter actually forgot to put in this order, which happened to be the birthday girl's! Tsk tsk, tut tut. Lucky for them, it's a dish that doesn't need cooking so they were able to rush it out to her pretty quickly. This was light years better than the lamb chops that I ordered, which were cold by the time they got to me. I realize that lamb chops need to be rested to keep the juices in the meat, but my dish was just sitting out too long, IMO.

3. Dessert. This plate of heaven was served up for our birthday girl (but charged to us for $25—no birthday freebies even at this restaurant of supposedly high standards). In the end, we didn't begrudge them the $25 because it was a truly delicious pile of desserts. The mini chocolate souffle, the green tea cake, the banana-flavored mille-feuille, the cream puffs, the little chocolate cubes, even the ice cream and sorbet ... every bite was just scrumptious. But I still begrudge them the rest of the money I paid for the largely subpar meal.

In the end, we consoled ourselves by saying that at least we'd checked this off our list and could move on to other restaurants. But would we come back? Probably not.