Lokelani’s
Lokelani’s, Ithaca, NY
http://www.lokelanisrestaurant.com/index.php
Price: $$$
Cuisine: French
General
Recommendation: As nice as the waiters are at Lokelani’s, it really is a place to miss
and I won’t be surprised if it’s the next nice restaurant to close in this
area. The menu is tiny and the food
isn’t very good. It’s too bad too
because the staff is nice and the look of the restaurant is actually quite
pleasant. The location also isn’t too bad.
John and I had been to this restaurant when it first opened
and though neither of us remembered it being that great, we thought it would be
worth trying again. We had a gift
certificate we had bid on at a charity auction to use so we decided to go this
weekend. We got there just before 9 on a Saturday night
and we were the only table in there. It
looked like a few large parties had just left but there were also several
undisturbed tables. Only one other group
of 4 came in the whole time we were there. Things are not looking good for Lokelani’s.
We went in excited to have a nice meal and unfortunately, we
were very disappointed in the limited menu and my entrée was terrible. I don’t often complain to the waiter about
the food in a restaurant, but I did here and it was too bad that there wasn’t
much they could do to improve it. Our
waiter did offer to bring me something else, but I declined- there wasn’t
anything else on the menu that sounded good. John thinks throwing in one or both desserts would have been appropriate-
I’m not sure I agree- but when the waiter carried back my fairly full plate of
food to the kitchen- I guess I’m a little surprised they didn’t do anything
about it. It was an expensive meal to
not eat or enjoy. For more info on why I
thought the food wasn’t good, see below. And before you do, I must say that I don’t have a problem with a
restaurant taking a traditional item and preparing it a new way- that’s often
quite fun- especially when they prepare it in a new, creative, and tasty
way. That is not what was going on here,
however.
The Food:
Don’t let the online menu fool you- it’s not actually that
long at the restaurant. Wait! I was on the website last night looking at
the menu and it’s down today. Seeing as
how their homepage talked about the New Years Eve menu, I suppose they decided
today would be a good day to change it. Very
interesting. Well, since the website is
currently “under construction”, let me tell you a little bit about the
menu. There were two appetizer choices
(escargots and an avocado salad), one or two simple salads, French onion soup, five
entrée choices (steak, chicken, veal, lamb, and pork), and two fish entrees (I
remember a tuna dish and a white fish- perhaps tilapia but it may have been a similar
fish). I remember wondering if this was
a special prix fix menu- it seemed really small- but it was the standard
menu. I suppose I was most surprised by
the limited appetizer list. I find that
often, when I’m somewhere with a small menu, I’m usually forced to order
something I wouldn’t otherwise and am usually pleasantly pleased with what I
ordered in a good restaurant. That was
not the case here. I stuck with what I
knew and was pretty disappointed. I will
say, however, before I talk about the disappointing food that the bread they
bring you is freshly made and quite tasty and I was happy that they refilled it
without being prompted.
Here are details on our order:
First Course: French
Onion Soup and Escargot
A friend who had recently been to this restaurant said that
he thought the French onion soup was one of the best he’d had. He probably hasn’t had a lot of French onion
soup. While I wouldn’t put it at the
bottom of the list of all French onion soups I’ve ever had, it was incredibly
salty. The escargots were presented on a
dish out of their shells which makes for a fairly ugly presentation. They tasted fine but seeing little escargot
bodies sitting in a dish of butter wasn’t very appetizing. Plus, there was so little butter in the dish,
the escargots were not soaked resulting in the bottom half of the pieces
tasting good and the top half tasting dry and crispy. I wouldn’t order either dish again.
Second Course: Lamb
Chops and Steak L’Entrecote
I didn’t complain about the first course because the things
I didn’t like were essentially a matter of personal preference and I had no
major problems eating either dish. This
could not be said for the entrees. John
ordered the lamb chops- something I don’t like to do in restaurants because
they’re generally pretty fatty and his were certainly that. But they were actually prepared well so we
really didn’t have any complaints there. My steak was also incredibly fatty, however, and this is not what one
expects with steak l’entrecote- I think it was a bad cut of rib eye or
something. Anyway, I was expecting a
thinly sliced, delicious cut of beef with a tasty sauce over the top but
instead got a piece of fatty rib eye that had been grilled with some salt and
pepper and then a small scoop of what was supposed to be l’entrecote sauce
sitting in the middle. It was a definite
disappointment. But it gets better. In addition to the meat, both dishes also
came with fries and a salad. The fries
were not frites (the thin, crispy fries that traditionally come with steak
l’entrecote and are so fun to dip in the sauce on the plate- when there is any-
which there wasn’t on my plate). Instead, these were very thick cut fries and they were quite underdone. So I didn’t eat those. And the salad was actually just a plain
spring mix- there was no dressing- just lettuce mounded on the side of my
plate. At first I thought it was just
decoration but there was enough of it to signal that it was meant to be eaten. Where was the dressing? We asked our waiter about this- he said that
people complained about the restaurant using winter vegetables when it was
supposed to be spring so they moved to salad but then people complained that
the salad had dressing on it. So now
we’re eating plain lettuce. That was the
most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. While I appreciate a restaurant listening to feedback from guests- can
the chef really not get more creative than plain lettuce? The entire dish was so half-heartedly
prepared, I was amazed. And since
neither of us remembers being wowed by our meals in our last visit, I don’t
think that this low level of quality was an anomaly.
Dessert: Chocolate
Mousse and Crème Brulee
Since we hadn’t really eaten our entrees, we decided to try
out dessert. They were out of pear tatin
which is fine- we wouldn’t have ordered that anyway. The chocolate mousse was tasty and I enjoyed
it with the freshly brewed decaf coffee we ordered. The crème brulee was good-sized and not too
bad- the custard was a little thick but it still tasted good.
Drinks:
Lokelani’s offers a fairly small wine list but the wines are
actually all pretty decent which is nice. We actually found one of our favorite inexpensive wines there on our
first visit: Lulu B. They were promoting
it and so we tried it and actually enjoyed it and are happy that the wine store
we go to sells it. On this visit, we
tried another wine that was new to us: Maison Nicolas Pinot Noir. Like Lulu B., it’s a wine that can be bought
for less than $8 in most wine stores- it’s $30 here at Lokelani’s. I think the Lulu B. is slightly less than
that ($28?). Anyway, they essentially
quadruple their price of wine here which seems a bit excessive but supposedly
standard practice for less expensive wines. For some reason, I always thought that it was common for restaurants to
double and maybe triple the price- quadrupling seems a bit much- even though I
know places tend to mark up less expensive wines at a higher rate, a mark up of
more than 4x seemed pretty high. And now
that I’m thinking about it, I’m more annoyed about it- the wine probably should
have been $25- but hey, they were able to sell it for $30 so apparently our
willingness to pay allows this pricepoint.
Since we were asked if we wanted something to drink while we
looked over the menu, I’m making the assumption that they serve cocktails there
as well. It was also good that they
brewed us a fresh pot of decaf coffee at the end of the meal.
The Service:
I wrote “The Rules” believing that good service in a
restaurant can make you like a restaurant even if the food isn’t all that
great. Maybe it’s because the food was
actually bad and the restaurant was so eerily empty, but the nice waiter who
did a great job could not fix our experience. The only rule they broke was no butter knives but they did everything
else right with regard to the rules- even my newer unofficial one I’m still
considering about overpouring the wine- he did all that right. Our waiter was friendly and he didn’t
hover. Though he didn’t refill our wine
glasses once, he did keep the water glasses full throughout the night and
offered to bring us more bread to go with our appetizers without being
prompted.
He also seemed genuinely concerned that we weren’t happy
with our meal- he even went back and looked to see if perhaps there were better
cuts of beef for my entrée to no avail. I suppose we’re a little annoyed about paying for a meal I didn’t enjoy
or eat- even Applebee’s covered an entire entrée once when there was a problem-
this is a decision that should be under his discretion. But I have mixed opinions about the way he
handled it since I wasn’t complaining in an effort to get free things- I really
thought there was a problem with my food. I’m only bothered because I know how other places have handled similar
situations and I left those establishments much happier and have even returned
to them. Perhaps this problem I’m
struggling with is that when I told him about the issues with my food, it sounds
like it had actually been prepared as it normally is and therefore, I most
likely won’t like my next meal I eat there either, so maybe it wasn’t worth the
effort to keep me happy. Maybe.
The Atmosphere:
Lokelani’s moved into what used to be Les Deux- another
French restaurant that closed about a year or so ago. They did a nice job making some changes- the
color scheme went from a French Country feel to a bright red and black
theme. The pictures on the walls are all
French images and the music is a mix of French and Sinatra-like jazz which is
nice. It’s not a large restaurant but
it’s divided up in a way so that you can’t see all parts at once, due to
strategically placed low walls and dividers. We got to sit at the window which was a good spot. If you read all this and want to try the
place, I’d recommend trying to get a spot at the window so you can watch all
the people walk by and get a kick out of how few people are able to park in the
parallel spots in front (we must have seen at least 5 cars give up immediately
on spots they would have fit into without a problem if they weren’t afraid to
parallel park). The weirdest aspect of
the restaurant is how empty it always is. I have to say that it’s a great place to take someone who’s hard of
hearing since there is almost no background noise. Not sure what it would be like if it were
crowded though- the tables aren’t all that far apart so one or two talkative
groups could get noisy if the place was full.
There is a definite Asian theme throughout the restaurant-
the name is Hawaiian so I assume there’s some influence from the family in that
sense. The plates have an Asian feel to
them- black dinner plates, for example. It
was an interesting look and feel to the restaurant- you almost expect the menu
to be more pan-Asian than French when you walk in there.
One thing that was very off was the quality of the
silverware. The forks were a joke- they
were so flimsy, John spent the entire time he had his entrée bending it back to
it’s somewhat-original shape. We asked
our waiter about it and he laughed- agreed that it’s a problem and that many
other customers have had the same complaint. Why don’t they get decent forks? I also thought that the steak knives could use some improvements. They gave us those large, clunky wood-handled
knives with the rounded tip. Given how
fatty much of the food they serve is, smaller, more pointy knives would make
much more sense for carving out the good pieces of meat. Updating the silverware would help make some
people’s experience much better, believe it or not.
