We were trying to find a restaurant for a Friday night before a Broadway Show, and Mike mentioned that he had wanted to try Kingside in the Viceroy Hotel (57th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues). It looked good from the outside, with a nicely lit sign and the black and white checkered floors that I’m a sucker for.
The menu looked pretty great, too.
I absolutely love artichokes, and would probably call them one of my favorite foods. So we had to get the crispy baby artichokes. I was kind of shocked and appalled by the price: $20. But I went with it.
These were good, though a little greasy, and not great. Certainly not $20 great. What are they thinking? Not everyone is an artichoke sucker like me!
Mike chose the braised pork shank with roasted shallots, escarole and pork jus. This should have been great. I mean… how can braised pork shank not be great? But it just wasn’t. The meat was tasty but had very little flavoring besides the meat. It felt a bit like a finely cooked piece of meat swimming in flavorless jus. How is pork jus flavorless? I’m still confused.
We got a side of the brussels sprouts with mustard and black garlic. These were also very ehh. I LOVE black garlic and I would not have been able to identify that flavor anywhere in this dish. The sprouts were a bit soggy and while they looked like they had a char, they were really just kind of limp.
And then I got the scallops (with butternut squash, bacon caponata, and brown butter)… good gracious the scallops. I love scallops. I basically could eat a scallop in any form. I don’t think I have EVER left a morsel of scallop on a plate in my history of eating scallops probably hundreds of times. But this? This was awful. The scallops were so over-salted I could hardly eat them and wound up leaving an entire scallop on the plate. An atrocity. I ate the squash hash because it was okay and I didn’t want to starve, but I was seriously angry that someone could ruin a scallop.
This was such a poor excuse for a restaurant. Someone took all the things that are trendy and good and then put a cook in there who had no idea how to execute on the food. The concepts of all the dishes were fine, but whomever was behind that stove should be ashamed of themselves. I really have to hope they had an off night, but there is no excuse for ruining a perfectly good scallop.
Total Nom Points: 4 out of 10
