Circle Bistro

Monday night my friends and I had a good meal with great service. Does that make a good restaurant or rather, just a good bar? Should service ever convincingly gloss over mediocre food, especially at a top 100 restaurant? If a restaurant seems high-class but gives off an eerie hint of a Shoney's, is that an objective observation or a subjective critique? Answers to these questions are a mystery, but at the end of the night at Circle Bistro, I'm not sure it matters if three girlfriends find solace in Spanish ham, fancy pasta, and a cheese plate and good gossip.

I got there early and was treated to a beer by a charming beer rep whose job it is to supply beer to restaurants. She had a beer book she was studying for an upcoming exam on brewing methods and types of beer. She recommended I get a glass of Matilda, to which I acquiesced as the glass featured a silhouette of a duck. It was smooth and sophisticated like wine, but as drinkable as Bud Light.

Circle Bistro offers a very appealing prix fixe menu for $38, another steal in this area. We began with bread--increasingly, a hard thing for restaurants to offer convincingly fresh--and started chatting and sipping our drinks in earnest. Either the general manager or the waiter, without communicating between each other, came by four times to see if we were ready to order. They were both mostly charming, so we let the intrusiveness slide.

My friends, also typically made better choices in their appetizers: the macaroni and cheese gratin featured al dente pasta with a creamy, cheesy sauce and some pork derivative.

Sarah had the bleu cheese and onion tart with apple slices, constructed in a perfect pastry.

I had the charcuterie plate with Spanish ham and chicken pâté. The ham was rich and tender, but the pâté was unappetizing. The pickled vegetables, including carrots and cornichons, weren't abundant. My description of them is as bland as the plate was.

It was one of those restaurants that was missing something, maybe something as simple as an expectable demographic (young people) or more formal service. Restaurants attached to hotels attract different types of diners; here it was a few families and lots of single, traveling businessmen, which lends a very perfunctory feel to the act of dining, as though it's an event to do after touring the monuments and before the pool. The service was warm, but more fitting for a family restaurant with plates of fried chicken (which I'm starting to pine for more and more) than a bistro.

Friends ordered steak frites and the rock fish with mussels.

I had the tagiatelle with a bolognese sauce. The pasta was beautiful but the sauce was too cream-based and not proportionate to the amount of pasta.

Dessert had things looking up, with a fine selection of cheeses and a nut-raisin bread as accompaniment.

My friends did equally well with the chocolate mousse and the molten chocolate cake.

It was good, but not amazing, and the service was attentive, but without the formality that nimbly allows a waiter quickly switch from waiter to friend then quickly back to waiter when a table's conversation is deep. Next time I'd have a Matilda at the bar and a croque monsieur.