Le Colonial
Some good friends of ours had a joint birthday party recently, and one of their mothers organized a huge dinner at Le Colonial. Most long-time Bay Areans will think of it as the former location of Trader Vic's, but I've never eaten at either of the two restaurants, so I can't speak to it one way or the other.
But I was pretty eager to try it; the menus on their web site made me glad my Friday lunch was so meager.
The walkway up to the restaurant is stunning, a covered veranda filled with lush plants and small tables. And as beautiful as the inside was, it was marred by the loud music from upstairs (fortunately almost inaudible in our side room) and the crowd, which definitely seemed like they were there to be seen, not to enjoy a nice evening out.
As we all arrived, we saw our table for the evening: a long narrow table which could adequately hold 18 people. Not the best way to see and talk to everyone, but our neighbors and we quickly concocted a plan to share appetizers and bites of entrées to make sure that even if we didn't get to talk to everyone, we'd make an effort to eat everything.
Our first plan was to get several of the "tasting platters" from the appetizer menu. Each one served two people, so we got three for the eight of us to try (yes, the math doesn't work; but we wanted to save room for the main course). The tasting platter had all sorts of yummy things on it, a small sampling of the restaurant's appetizers. Melissa really liked the crab cakes. As the designated wine snob in our corner of the table, I ordered us a bottle of the Zind-Humbrecht 2000 Riesling from Alsace. Not knowing what the food was going to be like, I opted for a wine that I thought would complement the spicier fare, and Zind-Humbrecht is a reliable producer.
Our corner collaborated to try and get the best variety of main dishes so we could try bites of each. I got the Truu Nuong (grilled lamb chops), Melissa got the Vit Quay (slow-roasted duck), our dining companion James got the Bo Luc Lac (wok-seared beef tenderloin) and his partner Jeffrey got the Ca Ngu (seared ahi tuna). The duck and the beef were the standout dishes, though the ahi tuna and lamb chops were perfectly decent.
To go with this, I opted for a 1999 Chapoutier Chateauneuf-du-Pape (that's my memory anyway), again going for a sure-thing producer and a food-friendly wine to play it safe. The wine list is heavy on French and California wines, two regions that I know little about.
Finally, for dessert Melissa and I split the Le Colonial Banana Split, and each of us had a glass of Inniskillin ice wine to go with it (I think a Riesling one, not Vidal, which is the grape most often used for Canadian ice wine).
Overall, the food was good. I guess $50 is reasonable for an appetizer, entrée, and dessert in a nice restaurant (the wine total was much, much higher), but I kept feeling like the food wasn't quite worth it. Maybe Melissa's right, and being in a large group made it tougher for me to get comfortable and focus. Or maybe it was that the presentation was lacking; it seemed like fairly standard Vietnamese-restaurant presentation, gussied up slightly. It's not like I was dissatisfied, either; I'd definitely give them a second chance and see if I'd like them more in a smaller group, where I could really focus on the food and not try to have seven or eight simultaneous conversations.
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