There's been a lot of buzz around Jersey City as the new place to live and eat given how expensive everything else in Manhattan and Brooklyn have become. Talde's original location is in Park Slope and I remember given it a scathing review but I had to actually go back and re-read to job my memory on why I hated it so much. Yikes, I did not like it at all. But when my VP was in town and suggested Talde in Jersey City, I was trying to keep an open mind that maybe it would be different at this location, plus I've never really eaten in Jersey City so I wanted to see what all the buzz was about.
Umm, not to sound like an elitist but if this is one of the better restaurants in JC, I don't have a ton of high hopes for the area. It is located on a bustling cute street in the neighborhood which seemed to be lots of fun. The restaurant itself was open and spacious and nicely designed. We got there on a Thursday night and they had a live band in front that was so loud that I could barely hear or understand the person standing 2 inches from me. That was one of my first problems with this place - you're not a bar so why do you have deafening music playing? We were a fairly large party (about 15 people) so we were seated at this long concrete slab in the middle of the restaurant. Our waiter was very nice but when you have this big of a party, the waiter should try to take control of the situation otherwise it becomes chaos with ordering, which is what happened. Everyone was confused, no one knew who was order for who and in the end we split up into 3 sections and had people from each part of the table ordered for their little area. The menu overall isn't huge, it has about 5 noodle dishes and 5 entrees and a handful of appetizers and sides. We asked the waiter how we should order and he said something crazy like 4 appetizers, 1 noodle, 1 entree and a side PER PERSON (turns out he wasn't entirely wrong). We all thought that sounded crazy to order 6-7 dishes for person, so we ordered 4 total appetizers and 4 total noodle + entree + sides for our little corner of 5 people. We got yuzu guacamole, edamame bao, pretzel pork and chive dumplings, spring rolls, chow fun, whole branzino, hanger steak, and blue crab fried rice.
The waiter did warn us that the food will come out as it's ready but with this big of a group that's a huge mistake. They should course it out otherwise only certain parts of the table will get food while others will be waiting around. And that's exactly what happened. We waited FOREVER for even just the appetizers to come out and they were so small for a group of 5 that we were splitting them into tiny pieces so that everybody could have something and not starve to death. The descriptions of everything on the menu seemed a little off than what they were. For example, the yuzu guacamole was really more crispy rice with some avocado spread on top. Granted the menu did mention crispy rice, but the headline was guacamole and that's not how people expect to see guacamole. The edamame bao was weird and again it did say on the menu that it was a falafel format but that was buried in the description. When most people see edamame, I don't think they assume it's chopped up into a falafel. As someone who loves chow fun, this one was not good. First, it comes out all rolled up which is such a mistake because it gets sticky and dried out really quickly if it's not soaking in moisture. I immediately tried to break it apart and drown it in the pork and mustard green base but it still ended up being really dry and hard to eat - good chow fun should be slippery and moist (that sounds kind of gross). Where the food did redeem itself was with the branzino and blue crab fried rice. The branzino was wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed with turmeric and tomato - nothing more delicious and Asian to me than steamed whole fish. The fried rice was a good addition and not too greasy or salty and it had a nice generous helping of blue crab meat in it. The other parts of the table ordered a bunch of other things like the chicken, short ribs and pork that got passed down and weren't too bad. By the time everyone got their food and we ate it, we had probably been at the restaurant for almost 3+ hours. It was an incredibly exhausting meal.
While the last few courses did redeem this place a bit, the insane amount of time we had to wait for our food and the obnoxiously loud music made it really hard for me to like this place. After re-reading my previous review, it doesn't look like too much has changed from my last experience. While I'm still interested in seeing what JC has to offer, I'm not sure if this is really the best first impression.
Photo Credit: Yelp
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