Patina Grill, Richmond, VA

[Kim Shook]

Has anyone been to Patina Grill? We went on July 9th for my birthday dinner and had a really bad experience. I had high hopes for this meal. I have heard nothing but good about Patina - both in the media and on the internet. The place is just beautiful and the menu impressive. The wait staff is very friendly and seemed knowledgable. The quality of the ingredients was top notch - I'd love to have the ability to get seafood where ever it is that they do. But...

Start to finish the execution was seriously flawed. Most everything was overcooked to the point that it was dry and tough and chewy.

Mr. Kim started with bresaola, feta and roasted pepper calzone w/ fennel-olive puttanesca. The flavor was wonderful and the rich sauce helped cover the over cooking of the calzone. You really could taste the separate ingredients and they were so well suited to one another. I thought that the fennel-olive sauce was especially good.

Jessica's app. was seared scallops and spinach gnocchi w/ proscuitto & herb butter. The scallops were beautiful - sweet, obviously dry scallops and the gnocchi were beautifully light. Again, inexplicably and criminally over cooked.

I started with fried oysters, cornmeal dusted & served with applemint remoulade. The oysters were NOT over cooked. They were delicious and sweet and briny. I thought that the 'dusting' of cornmeal was a little heavy, but that's a minor complaint. The remoulade was indistinguishable from tartar sauce - I couldn't taste the mint. As a matter of fact it wasn't until I reread the menu that I even remembered that it was supposed to be applemint.

Mr. Kim's main was coho salmon with red dal, dosa and eggplant bringal. Again, the fish was so good and fresh and the over cooking had dried it out unforgivably.

Jessica's main was butternut squash and chevre ravioli with rosemary-maple brown butter and asparagus, lemon & pine nut saute. The filling was delicious with a perfect balance of the silky squash and the more assertive chevre. The asparagus was crisp-tender and very fresh. The pasta (housemade - we know because we saw them rolling it out in the kitchen) was so tough that you couldn't cut it with the side of a fork.

My main was rabbit BBQ w/ scallion-corn hushpuppies and grilled vidalia onion relish. The rabbit was so tough that not only did it not pull apart to pressure, it was actually hard to cut with a knife. The sauce and relish were tasty, but the hushpuppies lacked flavor and were just blobs of fried, heavy dough.

I was the only one who got dessert - it was my birthday, after all! I got frangelico-lemon cheesecake w/ amaretto cookie crust. It was a large piece of creamy cheesecake - admittedly, I am not a big fan of cream cheesecake. I prefer the texture of classic NY-style cheesecake. Drier than creamy and one that, if you picked it up in two hands and bent it, it would break. So that's personal preferences. But the crust was soggy and I got no frangelico, lemon or amaretto flavors at all. It just tasted like a creamy, plain cheesecake.

This was a fairly expensive meal - 3 apps, 3 meals, 2 cocktails, 2 coffees, a liqueur and one dessert cost $160. We sent back the rabbit and ravioli and they, of course, took them off the bill - very nicely and apologetically, too. I would have been much more forgiving if it had only been one dish that had this problem, but 2 of the apps. and all three mains? I hope that they were just having an off night. I'm not sure that I would ever be able to convince Mr. Kim to go back, though. I thought that it was odd, too, that we sent 2 of three mains back and no one in management came to the table. I would have expected SOME interest in that. The chef has a mixed background (Millie's and Havana 59) but really should know better. Maybe he wasn't there that night and his assistants were new. Honestly, it was as if someone had taken perfectly chosen, perfectly seasoned and perfectly prepared meals and set them under heat lamps for an hour. Whatever, we had a seriously subpar meal and what's worse - they took fine quality ingredients and ruined them - to me that's a bigger sin that using sub par ingredients in the first place.

Mr. Kim's take on the evening:

"Last night’s meal was reminiscent of the perennially disappointing Washington Redskins: A lot of initial promise with terrible execution. Beginning with my drink order, I should have known I was in trouble. My request for a “dirty martini” was met with a vacant look followed by passive acknowledgement that should have warned me. Instead of vodka, I got gin. Instead of olive juice, I got….gin. Just a portent of things to come.

My appetizer sounded interesting. A calzone, featuring bresaola, feta, and roasted pepper calzone with fennel-olive puttanesca. Sounded downright yummy, in fact. And while the puttanesca was everything I expected, the calzone itself was charred excessively – I have a feeling by design, as it was quite obvious. While this did not ruin the flavor, it rendered the pastry tough, forcing me to crush it with a knife to get at it. This in turn rendered the calzone pretty much empty with its contents spilt into the pattanesca. The flavors were great, and it all went down well, but this could have been so much better with a more tender treatment of the calzone shell. Still, everything I note on this dish could be attributed to chef’s vision versus my preferences rather than inattention and ineptitude. These last terms I save for the Large Plate.

My dinner was placed before me by a table runner – the first thing brought to me by someone other than our waitress. Perhaps this was because the kitchen was tired of seeing my grilled wild sockeye salmon over split red lentils and dosas with bringal and mint chutney sitting there dying under a heat lamp, I do not know for sure. In any event, it arrived much the worse for having been in that kitchen. The salmon itself was the driest piece of fish I have eaten, short of jerky. Not only was there no moisture on the top of the fish, but upon flaking it the interior was also a husky reflection of the usually moist meat. It was flavored gently and well, but required large quantities of water with each bite. The lentils beneath were very tasty, but any goodwill generated by this layer was swept away by the unforgivably dense dosas cakes beneath. These could not only be cut at all with a fork, but were so cold and dense that they could not truly be cut with a knife – they had to be ripped apart to be eaten. At $30, a very disappointing plate, to say the least. It would have been returned to the kitchen had it not been the best of the three entrees at the table."

I hate to damn a restaurant on just one visit. But the faults were so all pervasive, that I was wondering if anyone else had an experience here that could explain this?