I'm usually very skeptical of hotel restaurants because they are either way overpriced or just serve mediocre food. I'm even more skeptical of trendy hotel restaurants - so when we ended up at Bodega Negra for Jenn's bachelorette party I was a bit worried. But it actually ended up being super fun and the food really surprisingly good (although I'll talk about the prices later).
The restaurant is in the uber trendy Dream Hotel near the Meat Packing District, so you can only imagine what the crowd is like. Even at 7pm, you could see the crowd of young club goers trying to get into the rooftop bar of the hotel. The entrance to the restaurant is pretty hidden and once you enter it almost felt like I was in a club in Vegas - it was almost dark I nearly tripped going down the stairs and it's very loud (yes, I know this makes me sound like an old lady). Since we were such a large party, we had arranged to have a set menu for dinner. When I first looked at the menu I thought I was going to choose from the different dishes but then I was told we were actually getting everything on the menu and sharing it family style. Oh my - there were 12 dishes on the menu and apparently we got 2 of everything on the menu.
We started the meal with the guacamole which was nice and smooth and it was served with chips, jicama and radish. It was a solid guacamole - no complaints here. Next for the "first course" which was 4 different dishes: quesadilla rustica, chopped salad, fish tacos and chicken tostaditas. The quesadilla was more like a very thin crust pizza instead of an actual quesadilla in a flour tortilla and folded over. It was served with four cheese, habanero, roasted tomato and chimichurri - it was a nice starter dish. The chopped salad included avocado, queso fresco, pumpkin seeds and jalapeno cilantro. It was a HUGE salad and actually very tasty. It could definitely be a stand alone meal for someone if they were looking for something on the lighter side. The pumpkin seeds were a nice touch and added a smokey crunch to it. The fish tacos came with tomatillo orange salsa, chayote jicama slaw and crema and it was fantastic. The fish was grilled and was cooked perfectly - very firm but still moist at the same time. The combination of the all the ingredients made it quite a refreshing but satisfying taco. At this point, I barely had any more room to try the chicken tostaditas but I managed to eat a few without the tortilla shell and the shredded chicken was quite tasty.
I could have totally be done with dinner at point and been really happy but we still had our main entrees to come. They rolled out the Roasted Amish Chicken, Carne Asada and Chile Relleno along with sides of black beans, fried plantains and green rice and I thought I was going to burst. There was literally no room on the table for everything so we ended up just laying some dishes on top of each other. The plates were each gigantic and we could have gotten away with just one of each instead of 2 of everything. Of course I had to try a little bit of everything and I gotta say I was impressed with most of it. The chicken still had the skin on it and the meat was very moist and juicy and it was served with grilled zucchini, squash and avocado tomatillio with chile chicken jus poured over it. Next I tried the carne asada - which was cooked nicely medium rare and served with mole negro and roasted peppers. It's hard to go wrong with grilled skirt steak - yum! At this point I really just couldn't eat anymore, so I didn't try the chile relleno but it smelled great.
Of course I say I can't eat anymore but then they put the plate of dessert out in front of us and I couldn't resist but to dive into the Tres Leche cake. Delicious! It was was the epitome of a milk cake because it was incredibly moist and you could tell I had been soaking in all sorts of milks.
So why only the 3 fork rating if I enjoyed the food? Well, unless I'm totally missing something, I felt totally taken advantage of when the bill came. We were told in advance that it was a $75/person prix fixe - which was totally fine by me and I would not have been bothered by it until I just looked the regular prices on their menu (which are pretty high for what the food costs - i.e. $16 for the guacamole). I added up the price of all of the dishes and unless I am mis-calculating, if we had just ordered all the food on our own it would have come out to less than $50/person. That to me is a pretty big difference and considering there were 10 of us, that's an increase of over $250 of what the bill should have been. On top of that, gratuity was not included which is completely ridiculous. Our waitress was incredibly nice and I didn't mind giving her a good tip but when a place is marking up the already overprice prix fixe and then asking us to add another 20% on top of it, a meal that would probably only cost us $75-90 total ended up costing each person $140. It's most definitely not the fault of anyone who planned the party and in the end it was fine because it's more about the people you are with and the fun times you have, but I definitely felt a bit raked over the coals. So lesson learned, prix fixe is not always the best deal - don't assume that the restaurants will take care of you and always do the math first!
Photo Credit: Yelp
No comments:
Post a Comment