First visit to Birdie G’s tonight:
Cornbread, cesar, rice-flour coated mushrooms, grilled striped bass (the last two items differ from what is shown on the website’s menu). 2 non-alcoholic drinks.
This was a very weird experience. The cornbread was oddly soft (like almost flaccid) but tasty enough. The corn-shaped bread and butter was a nice touch, though.
The cesar, again, tasty but not exceptional.
The mushrooms were incredibly bland in flavor. As in, they looked like potatoes and had no discernible mushroom flavor. The mushrooms themselves were also very springy and bouncy.
The fish itself didn’t have much flavor, the tomato was actually quite unpleasant (I thought it was both bitter and lacking in tomato flavor; partner will only say that it was “odd”). The sauce had a hint of corn flavor, but it tasted like multiple ingredients all dialed in at a medium intensity (so there wasn’t really an over-arching flavor).
Partner thought my drink was pretty medicinal; I thought his had a bit of an odd (and not entirely welcome) funk.
The experience was weird b/c the ingredients seemed to be of excellent quality, and the preparation/technique (the little I understand and can discern of that) also seemed very good (eg., fish well cooked, good fry on the mushrooms). But the calibration of flavors in the mushrooms and fish was really, really off (to our taste). And the other two dishes weren’t amazing.
B/c of the high ingredient quality and technique, we assumed that the food was meant to taste the way that it did. And I could understand why the dishes are as expensive as they were. But we couldn’t understand why you’d want food to taste the way that the mushrooms and fish dishes did (particularly that tomato, which was bordering on genuinely unpleasant).
Really disappointed b/c I had been wanting to come here for awhile.
Service was very good.
I went to Ruben’s taco truck afterward b/c, while relatively full, I didn’t feel satisfied.