I ordered the signature Goat Cheese Ravioli with Brown Butter Sauce, Parmesan Reggiano, Crispy Shallots, Pancetta ($9.)
The only thing missing from my dish was any trace of goat cheese flavor, any resemblance to ravioli dough, any drop of brown butter sauce, any hint of parmesan reggiano, any crispness to the shallots and any physical evidence that pancetta had ever even brushed up against my plate.
There is a temptation to liken the deep fried shallots atop my goat cheese ravioli to Funyuns, but to do so would be an insult to Funyuns. When I worked the line in the Bay Area I deep fried shallots throughout the evening to garnish ahi poke and cold soba noodle salads. They should be thin, crisp, unbattered and lightly salted.
Lucy's Table deep fried thick hunks of shallots that were drenched in what appeared to be the same heavy batter they use for their onion rings. That is the equivalent of wrapping a single raspberry in a thick whole wheat apple dumpling dough and then expecting people to still be able to enjoy the flavor of the single raspberry.
There was an inconsistency in thickness that could have been avoided with the use of a sharp mandoline. The larger shallot hunks were rubbery while smaller slices were overcooked to the point of being so sharp they tore up my mouth when I attempted to bite into them.
Then there was the goat cheese ravioli. My mouth stretched in desperation to find any whispering hint of goat cheese. Alas, there was none. Nothing but mouthful after mouthful of hot cream cheese that must have had some miniscule portion of actual goat cheese incorporated into it but unfortunately not enough to be detected by the human palate.
A culinary deception I have seen in some restaurants including Lucy's Table is to stretch out expensive goat cheese by incorporating it with far less expensive cream cheese. Perhaps some restaurants could get away with shortchanging their diners back when goat cheese was exotic to most Portlanders, but those days have long since passed. Now it is simply insulting. If we are paying for goat cheese what we should be served is goat cheese.
Also puzzling is why Lucy's Table would pair such a bland cream cheese filling with an equally bland cream cheese like sauce rather than the brown butter sauce they had listed on the menu. My taste buds would have undoubtedly fallen into a coma out of sheer boredom with the dish were it not for the sharpness of the heavily battered shallots repeatedly jarring my mouth painfully awake. As for the pasta, it was rubbery and tasted more like sticky won ton wrappers than handmade ravioli. When pasta is that starchy it usually means that it was cooked in a pot with too little water.
Cathey and I also both ordered another house speciality, the Roasted Beet Salad with Pear, Red Onion, Cilantro, Feta, Cider Vinaigrette ($7.) We hoped it would compare to the delicious beet salad we shared at Serratto two blocks north on NW 21st and Kearny. It did not.
I took a bite and then watched for Cathey's expressions. Sure enough. Instant disappointment. Overcooked to the point that there were no signs of the veins or rings of the beet. The cider vinaigrette was nicely balanced and the red onion and pear both went fine with it, but the quantity of feta dotting the salad was the equivalent of four corn kernels.
I really fell in love with beet salads at Chez Panisse . They can be so wonderful when they are not overprocessed. The Chez Panisse Vegetables cookbook has a nice section on beet salads and the Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook has a wonderful pickled beet formula.
For her entree Cathey ordered the Grilled Painted Hills Beef Rib-Eye with Mascarpone Potatoes, Smoky Onion Rings, Seasonal Vegetable, Gorgonzola Butter & Beet-enriched Demi Sauce ($24.) Cathey, who as a former employee of Northwest Palate Magazine knows a little something about food, ordered her steak rare, rare.
"Good move!" I told her. "That's the only way to eat steak. Nice and bloody."
Imagine our disgust when what arrived was an overcooked stiff hunk of well-done steak slopped on top of runny mashed potatoes that lacked the slightest hint of mascarpone, all floating in a gelatinous sea of demi sauce.
Cathey called the waitress over, politely pointed out that the steak was far from rare, and sent it back to the kitchen. Five minutes later the waitress came back from the kitchen carrying the same plate (in clear violation of both state and federal health regulations.) The chef had cut and discarded a hunk from the side of the steak that clearly revealed a well-done steak but sent the waitress back with it anyway to argue that it would probably be pinker closer to the center.
Cathey called their bluff and cut her steak right down the middle. "Look, she said, brown all the way through."
The waitress brought a second steak back 10 minutes later. I knew they were overcooking it as I watched the minutes tick by. Cathey cut it open. It still was not rare, and certainly not rare, rare. Instead it was medium-well. A step down from the well-done steak, but still cooked four stages above where she requested.
A dinner chef not knowing how to cook a steak is the equivalent of a breakfast chef not knowing how to fry an egg. Embarrassing for a place like Lucy's Table that charges $24 for a steak that the kitchen simply does not know how to properly prepare.
"I think this is as good as it's going to get," Cathey said as she began to saw through the gristle.
I noticed a horribly hard out of season summer squash was wedged between the steak and the runny potatoes.
"Where the hell did that summer squash come from?" I asked Cathey.
"Good question," she said. "It sure isn't summer." The exterior of the squash was rock hard, the interior pure mush.
Cathey dug her fork into the demi sauce, turned to me and said, "You should really try the gravy."
Hesitant, I dipped a spoon into the sea of gelatin upon which the rest of her meal floated.
"Oh! Horrible, so very horrible!" I cried out and was forced to throw back my head and gargle with my 2004 Sokol Blosser Pinot Noir ($8.50) to try and purge the horrible bitter flavor that hit the back sides of my tongue and I knew would stay there until it wore off.
"Country Kitchen," Cathey said. "It tastes like something my grandmother would make."
"Yes," I said, "Well it tastes like something my grandmother would make if she found some rancid 20-year-old beef bullion cubes in the back of the cupboard and decided to mix it with some 30-year-old red Jell-O that she found wedged in her car trunk and then boiled it all up in the old frying pan that my mother used to use to make mud pies as a child and then called it demi sauce."
"I would have rather they just brought me a happy meal," Cathey said as we walked over to Alotto Gelato in a desperate attempt to cleanse our palates post-meal. "At least then I would have gotten a free prize."
Why Lucy's Table even bothers to allow the red-coated parking valets lurking about their front entrance is beyond me. What we experienced was nothing more than posh culinary pig slop.
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