Five of us visited on Day 3.  Ultramodern, open/high-ceiling, strikingly decorated with a white and red-orange motif, nicely contrasted with black linen napkins.  Unlike other restaurants in the area, tables are not too close together, acoustics lend themselves nicely to private conversation.  JD, our waiter, was a pleasure. Incredibly enthusiastic, he carefully pushed and pulled us to order the “right” items.  So we were optimistic at first. 

JD sold us on the night’s appetizer, a very special grilled octopus.  Then he came back to give us the sad news that they ran out. We joked that the chef should come out and personally apologize.  He did, lol. Unfortunately, as great as the service was the food turned out to be typical of other Patina establishments.  It looked pretty to the eyes but just did not deliver in quality and flavor.  The five of us ordered five appetizers, five dinners, and all 7 desserts.  We all wanted to taste each other’s dishes. But since the portion sizes were microscopic (Hey JD, next time upsell on ordering extra) we went ahead and each took 1-2 bites of each dish and passed it to the next person.  The plates barely made it once around the table. 

Appetizers included the maryland crabcake, crusted (fried) oysters with a thai peanut sauce, peekytoe crab on tempura potato, blackcod in a miso sauce with a fried quail egg (pictured), and a carpaccio of bigeye tuna with macadamia nuts and coconut milk.  The portions on all were microscopic despite prices into the teens on each.  The miso cod was the best of the group; very flavorful sauce without it being too sweet as often occurs with miso sauces.

Mains were Sauteed Skate (Pictured: greasy, way too salty), Steamed turbot (nice flavor, too salty), seared scallops with shortrib ravioli, (scallops were slightly overcooked, ravioli was too salty and did not pair well) flatiron steak, (tasteless, not a good sear) and the signature snapper (wrapped in “paper,” pictured) that tasted of ginger and not much else.   

At that point, with every drop of food gone we were all quite hungry and were debating on going out to another place for dinner or just ordering all the desserts.  We went for the desserts.  We ordered all seven, and none were particularly memorable or that good.

The punchline was the bill.  They actually overcharged us by $170. The overcharge was comprised of two orders of octopus that we never received, a mischarge for a much more expensive bottle of champagne versus the one we ordered, plus they charged us corkage on 4 bottles of wine at $20 each.  We had actually only brought 2 bottles of wine, and I had gotten a phone quote of $10 corkage with it waived for each bottle purchased.  And doesn’t the Patina group have a no-corkage policy in general? On the champagne, they told us they brought us the more expensive bottle but would honor the lower charge since we ordered the cheaper one.  Actually, they really did bring the cheaper one.  That kind of put us off.

Sadly, I am looking at the itemized bill one more time as I write this blog, and it appears they did not remove the two charges for the octopus ($18) and there is still a $20 corkage.  Not cool.