I was actually pretty excited when my friend Nicole mentioned that she wanted to try out this Icelandic restaurant near her apartment. Ever since I visited Iceland last year, I have a soft spot for anything related to that area - ponies, sweaters, and even their food. It's definitely not a cuisine that's very popular even in a diverse city like New York, but it has slowly started to make its way to America.
We got a seat at one of the tables outside on a lovely Friday night. The menu, as you can imagine, is fairly limited with about 6 appetizer dishes and and 6 entrees. Based on my experience from visiting the country there last year, none of the dishes were particularly Icelandic - only the Arctic Char sounded remotely like it would be something you could find in Iceland. Nicole had warned me before hand that a friend had told her that the portions would be very small and expensive, so I was bracing myself for a somewhat typical high brow NYC experience. Based on that kind of feedback, you'd think this place would offer something like bread or something else to start the meal but we got none of that. We were debating what to get as a starter and we were feeling a bit adventurous and decided on the raw beef appetizer ($15) - which is really just a bad name for beef tartare. I was hemming and hawing between getting a fish or meat dish and resolved the dilemma by getting the diver scallops and pork belly ($25) dish while Nicole got the Char ($24). Our raw beef came out and it was your standard beef tartare but without a raw egg on top. It was served pretty finely chopped with littleneck clams and trout roe with toasted bread. For those of you who get grossed out by raw meat, I get it, but this really didn't taste like what you would think. It was a nicely done tartare albeit a pretty small serving for $15.
Then this is where things start to fall apart. We waited over 45 minutes for our food with no apologies from our waitress or the owner who had been milling around the front of the house. We chased down our waitress several times and instead of taking responsibility for it, she looked like a scared little mouse and would mumble something and then run away from us. To me, good customer service would be for her to say "I'm sorry this is taking so long, let me go and check on it for you" and then possibly offering up a free dessert or even going as far as comping one of our entrees for the long wait. Tables who clearly came after us were getting served left and right and by the time we got our entrees, it was past 10:30 (we sat down at about 9pm) and we were both about to offer up the table $50 for their food. Luckily when the food finally came, it was actually good but we were still pretty frustrated by the whole experience. I will say that my dish was plated beautifully. The diver scallops were a nice firm texture and were a pretty decent size. The pork belly was a bit on the fatty side but the combination of the pork, scallop and sweet corn was a surprisingly balanced profile. But as Nicole said, neither of our dishes seemed very Icelandic - more new American. Since we were so hungry, we had finished our dishes in less than 15 minutes. When the waitress came out and asked if we wanted dessert but without comping any of it, we took a pass.
It's not that I necessarily wanted free food, but more of a recognition that we were experiencing some poor customer service. I expect a good restaurant, whether high end or a small shop, to do the right thing by their customers and we didn't get it here. Total bill: $41/pp with tip and tax
Photo Credit: Yelp
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