Witty cigars turn out to be the most substantial part of the meal.
I had hoped to escape my theme of the cost of a restaurant food per dollar. A high cost per minute is bad in that you are possibly eating to fast. A low cost per dollar and you are eating to slowly, not always by choice.
And so it was at Three, One, Two ( 312 Drummond St, Carlton Vic 3053 +61 3 9347 3312) the latest incarnation of chef Andrew McConnell’s cooking. Four people for four hours (of actual eating) at $690. That means we are eating at about $2.875 a minute, the group of us. Or as individuals we are eating at 72 cents a minute.
On arrival we are sent to what I should describe as Siberia. But I try to avoid writing in clichés and tonight the ice-cold upstairs room is more like Denmark, which can also get pretty cold. At least the fact that Tasmanian-Danish princess Mary was recently in this room helps with my Danish metaphor. And boy were we reminded that her rather slim bottom had been perched on one of the chairs.
We sit in an empty room for nearly 25 minutes until the local chapter of Weight Watchers turn up and leak over the same chairs. At least I assume this Friday was a Weight Watchers night. Everybody, apart from us, was huge. I mean really lard-arsed to the point that I was worried whether or not the furniture could handle it.
I was going to save the food for later. Although there are eight (or nine) courses depending how you count them there is so little of it you’ll want to get in before the fatties steal it off your plate. That’s because the meal is so fucking tiny. I really wish I’d bought a small set of scales in addition to my calculator, and stopwatch (which also doubles as a GPS and weather barometer).
The eight course dégustation menu ($95) starts with the obligatory chef’s joke. Chef McConnell’s is a delicate pastry cigar filled with (I think) some soft cheese, tapanade, and balsamic jelly.
Crunchy, soft, salty and sour it is not the kind of starter to be taken lightly. Little did we realise that this would be the most substantial thing we would eat this night apart from several loaves of Baker D Chirico bread.
Our next two courses are good. Claire de lune oysters, spinach, sesame salad, mirin and soy are matched with the very vogue Delgado ‘La Goya’ Manzanilla Sherry (from Spain we are reminded!).
The crab broth with cuttlefish, crispy chicken and aromatics are good and matched well to the 2003 Granbazan “amber” Albarino, Rias Baixas, Albarino being another wine that has become popular on this year’s wine lists.
Smoked eel carpaccio: a single slice cut so thin that you can see through it.
The strange thing is that there appears to be more substance to the wine in our glasses than the delicious but teeny weeny portions of food on our plates. And because of that we are feeling a bit pissed and again filling up on bread.
The smoked eel carpaccio is the size of and almost as thin as a bank-note. It is delicious, finished by 9pm and leaves me and my three (slim) friends hungry for more.
At 21.32, as I ask for more while I discretely start my stopwatch. We are starving now. Jak (who is becoming cranky with hunger) and Carolyn, both petite souls, start to panic that the bread may run out.
We are told that our duck was just being plated.
21.36 Duck petit sale with foie gras parfait and green bean salad matched with 2005 Peregrine pinot noir from Central Otago in New Zealand. I too am now cranky and gobble these tiny morsels in two minutes flat. We were all hoping for something more filling.
21:47 Plates cleared away
21:56 Grain fed striploin, anchovy fritters and salsa verde arrive. I note there are almost two whole potato chips on the plate. Carolyn notes that the marzipan flavours of the 2005 Tardieu Laurent “les Bec fins” Cote du Rhone complement the food.
22:03 Steak finished. Honest, I was trying to take my time.
22:09 Plates go and we anticipate the arrival of the cheese. Perhaps now we can fill up on something other than bread.
22:13 The 2005 Max Ferdinand Richter Estate Riesling, Mosel, Germany arrives.
“Bollocks everything is so small”
22:23 St Marcellin, a soft surface ripened French Cow’s Milk cheese, with Fig, pistachio & Pomegranate arrive. “Bollocks! It’s so tiny,” says the birdlike Jak.
It really is cold now. Though our waitress is knowledgeable, personable and helpful, the fact that she is running up the narrow stairs of this inner city terrace means that she is hot and quite unaware how cold it is for those of us without the extra layers of fat.
22:43 Air conditioning switched off. Sorbet arrives. Again tiny. Gone!
I lose track of time but I have a feint memory of enjoying a small Chocolate terrine with cherries (not many!), blackberries & Créme fraiche ice cream. Drink: 2002 Castano Dulce Monastrell Yecla, Spain.
Coffee is complimentary. The room is empty but for ourselves.
12.05 Taxi finally arrives and we leave the restaurant to the staff.
Food Fascist
1. We were first in the room and first to order, I believe. How come everybody else in the room was fed and left, a long time, before us?
2. The portions are absolutely tiny. Too small. It is a joke to charge $95.
3. With tiny degustation dishes being served 20 minutes is far too long between dishes. 20 minutes is the maximum any “main course” size dish should take to arrive (unless otherwise specified on the menu).
4. December last year we ate at Circa The Prince when Andrew McConnell was still executive chef there. It was a truly excellent and well- executed meal. The portion sizes were perfect.
5. This is another case of well-recognised reviewers being treated differently to ordinary punters. Although what food we were served was delicious, and the selection of six wines at $55 excellent, we were disappointed.
6. Often I drink with my left hand. because the table was squashed in beside a lamp the only way to pour my drinks was from right to left across my body. Although there was no alternative this is intrusive and fairly poor form in a restaurant of this calibre.
7. It must be something about this building. In it’s previous incarnation as Mrs Jones I was served what should have been a warm fish dish stone cold.
8. Why the fucking hell can’t restaurants make an effort for all comers. I spend tens of thousands of dollars eating out each year and demand value for money.
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Maybe the restaurant is recommended in the Weight Watchers ‘How to trim fat’ guide. ‘Eat at Three, One, Two and watch the pounds fall away…for just $95.’
Virignifer, quite possibly and actually a lot cheaper than a run of the mill weight watchers programme.
Damn & I was really looking fwd to checking this place out, I love my food & definitely couldnt put up with the portion sizes or the wait in between each course!
Ange, you could try the regular courses which may be more substantial. Usually I complain meals are too large so I find it bizzarre to say this was too small. Perhaps it was the time it took to arrive.
This seems like a rather unbalanced review… I doubt that most customers at 312 would agree with your comments. Most customers would understand that you can not when it comes to a dining experience, make a formula for dollars vs time to understand your value for money. This does not make sense or cents… relax enjoy your experience be dazzled by the inticate details of the food and wine and the way it works together, forget the clock and have a good time, or go to sizzler for all you can eat, perhaps that is where your formula could be useful.
Jack,
Sense of humour failure althoughI must admit in my rush to post this I should have developed the tmeme further. Check out my Gingerboy post re costs of eating. The point is that service was far too slow and the portions were far too small. I would have been dazzled by the ingredients if I hadn’t had to wait nearly 40 MINUTES for a tiny course at which time I started watching the clock because I realised there was something up in the kitchen.
Hi Ed
I have read your Gingerboy review and this piece reminded me of your strange calculations, and that I don’t like them or think they add anything to your reviews (if anything they take up space that you could be talking about the food, wine or service in)I also feel that your strange coments about the fat people just make it all the more bizzare. I have dined at 321, Circa and Mrs Jones and can agree with some points of your piece the degustation portions are on the small side but this is to ensure that people can leave the restaurant in a comfortable state, and perhaps your meal was too spaced out, thats why you never achieved that critical point of hunger satisfaction. The important point I want to make here is that your meal is in your hands, you need to be responsible for your own satisfaction, some waiters may appear to be mind readers but they are not, perhaps you should have asked to be moved downstairs, to have the airconditionaer turned down, your meal hurried up, an additional course… perhaps you should read a great article on egullet a little while ago http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=91757
it is kind of what I’m talking about, there is also an extended piece on this topic in the latest Holly Hughes ‘Best food writing 2006′. If you spend so much money on dining every year (and it sounds somewhat begrudgingly so) I feel I want to help you get the most out of it. Oh and I missed the point when the 20 minute wait mentioned in your review became 40 minutes in your recent rebutle.
Aside from all this, totally agree with your Gingerboy review, see my comments on Tummy Rumbles page, and as you may have noticed from John Lethleans published review on Gingerboy, it not just regular diners who sometimes get the blunt end of the knife, John found the same inconsistances that we did there.
Nice blogging with you Ed.
Jack
Hi Jack
None of the money I spend eating out is begrundingly and on the whole I enjoy it. I usually eat out at least three times a week, and am paid to write about food as a journalist and do some paid reviewing. I wish I had the time to blog more of the good stories but it is the bad ones in the high profile restaurants that make the best posts. I should add on a cost per minute Sizzler (which I never itend to visit) or McDonalds would come in a lot more expensive than many of these meals. The point at Gingerboy was – tongue in cheek as with this review – was to point out how quickly it took. The point here is how slow it was and we did point this out.I’m refering to when we started to notice things were going slow (it was only then I started taking notice of the time) when it took at least 36 minutes – nearly 40 – for the tiny but delicious duck course in question to arrive. We did ask for the air conditing to be turned off and it was eventually. i wasn’t referring to the empty room. On reflection when we were shown upstairs I should have made a point about taking the vacant table in the dining rrom downstairs where the action is and I do kick myself for not doing that.
I saw your points on Gingerboy at the time. I gather it causd a bit of a kerfuffle there, as did Lethlean’s points. When I went back it had improved although I was with the manager.
Ed
It seems a shame to mostly blog the badly performing, high profile restaurants, a bit of a tall poppy restaurant syndrome…
I’m surprized at your comments in the 312 review about restaurants treating well known reviews differently (I assume you do not classify yourself in this category, but as the general public), and then you say that Gingerboy had improved but you where with the manager… Double standards seems to be at play here, and unfortunately for John Lethlean I can guarentee you that no restaurant worth their Maldon salt would not know what John or Necia look like.
Zoe and Teague of course know John, (and yourself? or was this after the fact of your review. Where you ‘invited’ back?)yet did not ‘fix’ the issues that John had with Gingerboy, I guess because they did not realise they existed. The funniest think about all this is the thing that bugged me the most about Gingerboy was the lax service, (I can deal with bland unadventerous food, unfortunately it sells!), and Zoe’s hosting of mine and a couple of other tables as they arrived was the thing that was the most annoying, blatantly rude.
Jackie
Hi Jackie
I should declare that I do know Jane who used to manage both Gingerboy and Ezard and the night I was there I was acknowledged by Zoe (because Jane must have spotted my name on thebookings list) but still the service was too fast and the food as stated. I didn’t hold back on the review. When Jane asked me in the food had more heat and of course the service was top notch, and it would have been difficult for me to blog that because of the conflict. I’ve long had a bee in my bonnet about reviewers being known in restaurants back from when I moved to Sydney (from the UK) in 1996. The problem is that the market is so small here and that there are only two or three reviewers in each City writing mainstream reviews that they can’t avoid being noticed. The same thing happens though to a leser degree in London where there are a dozen or sopeople doing this. And I guess I do try and regard part of my review as being entertainment as well as information. There are no rules to blogging and this is very much an experiment – a notebook –and I am trying to see what I can do outside what are the established formats in Australia an serve up variety with some form of innovation and perhaps stimulate some people to diagree or agree with me. Some people may like what I write others not. I was just out with Jane funnily enough and was telling her that I am going to try and blog more of the places I visit, which I will do. The sad fact is thogh I make 100% of my money from writing and sometimes I get busy which stops me from writing everything – I just need a break from it.
Anyway, like I said I hope to do better this year although I was also thinking about making the cost/minute part of an alternative scoring. system.
Ed, I feel your pain. We read Lethlean’s rave reviews (all 3 of them) about The Argo, went there on Valentine’s night (a bad idea, I know, I know…) and it was so crap that I felt compelled to start “The Dinner Blog” to vent my anger…
http://thedinnerblog.blogspot.com/
Did you notice how Epicure call’s John Lethlean a “reviewer” rather than a “critic”?
Jamie, i know what you mean about those review trifectas he does. I’ve recently painted my toenails blue and grown a beard as a disguise but don’t know if I can keep it up much longer – not that anyone knows me anyway.
I dined at Three, One, Two last week and had an equally bad experience. In fact all four of us did! Service aside (which was good), the food was substandard, with my main equal to that of what would have been served down at the local bingo hall – no joke! I didn’t eat the meal, complained but was still charged $40 for it! I can’t believe we walked
out of there $170 a head later!
Pam,
It wasn’t that the food was bad – I thought it was delicious. It was just so small and took so long to arrive. A good restaurant manager shouldn’t charge in that circumstance where you didn’t even eat the food but a lot of Australians don’t get the whole idea of quite how far service should extend.