My wife and I had the most bizarre evening last night. I’m retelling it because hopefully someone can tell me what we did wrong that triggered it? As you’ll see from the below, it’s not so much a bad experience as an utterly inexplicable one.
We went to dinner at David Toutain in Paris last night. We had reservations a month in advance arranged by our concierge; we were warmly welcomed, ordered the full tasting menu, I ordered the truffle extra, we split a decent bottle of burgundy. We were dressed normally - both wearing jackets. The amuses were delicious. We’d split a bottle of champagne in our hotel room, so we were certainly on the jovial side (my wife asked the waiter if she could have seconds of one of the amuses because it was so spectacular), but not anything out of line for a US restaurant. The staff was warm, one of the staff was actually American.
And this is where things get weird.
Once the main meal starts, it’s like we’re on hyper speed. Our pacing is totally different than the tables around us. Then they start skipping is courses - major courses. I start telling my wife to tone it down, that were being treated badly and maybe it’s because we’re too loud. She tells me I’ve gone insane, and now she’s pissed. But there’s no mistaking it, we’re being rocketed through the meal. Finally, after dessert, we pay and go to leave. We’re charged for a full meal. On the way out we pass other the tables, still on the middle of their mains, all being presented with a gorgeous pigeon en croute. We’d never gotten that course. I see plates of other food being cleared we’d never gotten. Folks who got the truffle course got an additional truffle course we never received.
We ask the guy working the front of the house what the hell is going on on the way out of the door. He says, yes, that’s pigeon. He says out meal should have had no problem, that it should have been perfect. My wife says something to the effect of “I don’t know what we did but it’s not right to treat people like this who make a reservation over a month in advance.” The guy sort of shrugs. We leave, mystified and pissed, fighting over who committed the faux pas that triggered it.
Then it gets weirder. About a half hour after we get back to our hotel, the front desk calls. It’s David Toutain. He is completely apologetic. He says that he has learned we did not receive part of our meal. He says there is no excuse for what happened. He describes it as “an unacceptable error thst should never happen in my restaurant”. He asks us to come back for lunch before we leave Paris so that he can make it right. We tell him (honestly) that we only have one meal left in Paris before we leave for Alsace, and that’s lunch at Arprge which we can’t cancel. He says Arpege is lovely. We thank him for his apology, which is as heartfelt as you can imagine.
But here’s the thing. There’s no way it could’ve been a mistake. We were about an hour ahead of the rest of the restaurant because of the pacing and skipped courses. We were getting our truffles when other folks were still eating fish. I imagine that this was a conscious decision by someone, somewhere in the chain. But I would also guess, just based on tone, the Mr. Toutain was pissed when he found out what happened. I can’t imagine he would take time to call us after service otherwise, and he was a complete gentleman on the phone.
My question is: what the hell just happened to us, and what should we do to keep it from happening again? All of our other meals in France have been lovely and if we’re doing something rude we’d rather know it so that we can fix it. We like it here.
