Monday, August 20, 2012

Boston Restaurant Week - Mistral


For the next two weeks I am going to be having dinner in some of the most exclusive restaurants of Boston. It is a great opportunity attending these dinners thanks to the prix fixe menus of the Summer Boston Restaurant Week

Mistral 

We started Restaurant Week with Mistral. This French restaurant is located in the South End and it features Provençal food. As we arrived we were told to wait. I am not sure if it was because we were only half of the party (Lisa and I were on time while Scott and Paul were 20 minutes late) but we had to wait for almost 25 minutes over our reservation time. Once we were escorted through the dining room, we were sat in a beautiful table with two sitting in a semicircular bench and the other two in chairs. The decoration of the place is better than Boston average but still nothing fancy.

So we were presented with the prix fixe menu. It had 3 options as appetizers, 3 as entrées and 2 desserts. As appetizer we all got the tart with duck ragut and some sweet sauce. The sauce was excellent, the duck so-so. And as an entrée I got the salmon, with olives and small potatos. The piece of salmon was over cooked and the olives were too powerful for the dish, so each time you got one, it killed the rest of the dish. And as dessert, a very bland panna cotta. The wine was a Val de L'Ours, with an OK flavor and price.

The service was disappointing. We had to wait a lot to put our requests to the waitress and it took a long time to get our food served. The restrooms were OK. The lighting, as common in the US, not bright enough. I (strangely) enjoy seen clearly what I am eating and the people I am eating it with.