Cork

When a girl gets to a certain age, sometimes she gets tired of the "whole thing": at a well-reviewed, one-name restaurant, in this case, Cork, mood lighting, tight bar seating, and mediocre food got in the way of an objectively superlative dining experience. It's the culinary equivalent of the bait-and-switch of asking if Cork is hot. No, but it's got a good personality. Well, maybe.

My favorite movie that is not Pride and Prejudice is When Harry Met Sally. Harry at the beginning of the movie explains why he's getting married. If you don't have the patience to watch the poorly dubbed clip subtitled in Japanese, I don't blame you, but he discusses how one can get tired of "the whole thing."

Besides the occasional disappointing dish, Cork was fine. But really, that's not good enough: there's no room for lackluster dishes. Further, and this gets to the old woman in me, a crotchetiness that probably seems evident, I'm tired of not being able to see a damn thing. Each photo had to be carefully crafted by tea light, but oftentimes we couldn't see exactly what we're eating ourselves. This is romantic for lovers but for friends who want to celebrate the art of food plating, the lighting was prohibitive. Even Tom Sietsema writes about average diner considerations, rating restaurants on prohibitively-loud noise levels. I find sight equally valuably as hearing at restaurants.

We started with wines, which were delicious. The wine menu helpfully laid out what flavors popped out of each one as we sat at the bar waiting for our table.

In exactly 45 minutes (as promised) we took our table, a lovely small piece of real estate toward the back and near the kitchen, but significantly darker. My friends are indulgent in ordering and permitting photographs (and I'm most grateful) so recently we have been consistently ordering for a table of four instead of two gossiping girls.

We began with the meat plate, a culinary repudiation of vegetarianism. We ordered (I believe), from left to right, the saucisson sec, the Hudson Valley duck salami, and the prosciutto with cornichons and hot mustard.

Seeking to order as close to half the menu as possible, we ordered the cheese plate, featuring the Detroit Street Goat (for you, Mike), a French sheep's milk and a delightfully chewy cow's milk cheese. I really don't remember. I was too busy nibbling on the candied nuts and dipping the cheese in honey and a Cabernet reduction, as well as voicing my opinion on all manner of gossip topics, to write down the types and provenance of the delicious cheeses. Which is too bad, as this really was the peak of deliciousness.

Before we ordered the cheese/charcuterie plates, we received the requisite basket of bread. In the small cup where butter typically finds itself, we had a wipe of something. It was unclear whether this was someone else's bread and butter ensemble or if the butter-cupper wasn't paying attention, but it was a bad entree to the rest of the meal.

In any case, our next item was the brioche sandwich, prosciutto and fontina on a brioche sandwich with an orderly sunny side up egg on top. Like a dessert version of a croque madame sans copious amounts of cheese. It was sinfully good, with sweet brioche and an exudingly-yolky egg. But, it was still a bit too orderly of a sandwich, with a tamed egg that was molded and a sandwich with hospital corners for sandwich termini. It tasted delicious but its lines seemed a bit harsh and unnatural, especially because the proportions were still more heavily in favor of bread than the ham and cheese.

As a reminder, I like Parisian egg-yolk sandwiches that embrace their natural curves.

After these three dishes, things started to get more mediocre. We had the pan-roast chicken breast. It looked so delicious but both the chicken and the potatoes were dry. It's possible we each had more glasses of wine than bites of chicken.

We ordered the chick peas out of an obligation for a vegetable in our small plates entourage. The chick peas weren't sufficiently mushy and the saffron broth with tomato and mint was rather flavorless.

Around this moment, when we stopped assuming that the food was good even though we couldn't entirely see it (and, of course, stopped talking 90 miles an hour) we realized the food was lacking either in flavor, desired consistency, or general pleasurability.

Our last dinner item was French fries, which were initally exquisite straight out of the fryer. Once the fries congealed, however, they were still delicious and crispy but the interior was wet, not from potato but from grease. Even three glasses of wine in, I wasn't ready yet for extreme hangover food.

The service was tremendous: our waitress timed the delivery and retrieval of dishes perfectly, especially knowing we were engrossed in conversation. She knew we were concerned about ordering too much, so scratched our order for duck (seriously, we ordered duck despite ordering five other dishes). Instead, we ordered an apple crostada with salted caramel and ice cream. This choice was unanimous and we defeated it.

It's not often a good sign when only the wine/charcuterie/cheese/dessert are the highlights, particularly as those items are more a factor of a restaurant's good taste than unique production capabilities. Just as I no longer want to date an aspiring musician, out-of-work poet, or 30-year-old-looking-to-find-himself anymore, I don't want to have a dinner I can't see that's banking on the fact I won't notice its inadequacies. Nevertheless, one more down.