76. Bastille
Oh, Bastille. Who was your real estate agent? Your location is so ridiculous—it is just about the same as a Tiffany’s being in the basement of a Chinese dry cleaner. Not only is Bastille in the very northern tip of Old Town, its right next to the train tracks and the coal power plant. If that wasn’t bad enough, the restaurant also shares a patio with a furniture store, making it damn near impossible to figure out which door leads the restaurant and which one leads to overpriced outdoor furniture. If you can make it through that first challenge, you’ll find food that’s, um…okay.
The menu leans toward France for the obvious reasons, but there is a bit of everything thrown in there, we’ll call it pan-French. We shared the shrimp and calamari beignets (French), which were really good if a little light on seafood. But really, how wrong can you go with fried dough dipped in a cream sauce? I would definitely recommend ordering that as a shared appetizer though—it was a perfect start. For my appetizer, I had the special salad, which amounted to an heirloom tomato panzanella (Italian). The flavors were nice, but the tomatoes were really butchered—it seemed like the outside was peeled off and just the smooshy guts were left. Lea started with the gazpacho (Spanish), which was not only flavorful, but was a portion large enough to do laps in.
For our main courses, we all ended up ordering appetizers (we’re dainty girls after all). Julie had the Burrata and heirloom tomato salad, which she gave a big thumbs up to, though it really just was a Caprese Salad (Italian). Lea had the half portion of corn risotto (American/Italian I guess), which was a very small portion for the money but had nice flavors. My dish was a major misstep for Bastille. I ordered the fois gras flan, which was served with toast and salt, one of my favorite flavor combinations. What I got was the fois gras with caramelized blueberries. Now, I was admittedly just too lazy or too stupid to send it back to the kitchen, but I full on hated my dish. It was a tiny piece of fois that had been burned on one side and the caramelized blueberries were (in my humble opinion) a total failure. I can’t think of any fruit I want to eat after it burns within an inch of its life. And to quote Lea, “you can’t promise a girl bread and then deprive her of it without some serious consequences.”
To get the terrible taste of the blueberry sauce out of our mouths, we were forced to order dessert. On the menu, the options were all pretty great, on the plate, they were a little uninspired. Though we had three different dishes (vanilla chiffon cake, chocolate truffle cake, and goat cheese cheesecake), they were all presented almost the same and honestly tasted pretty much the same. Lea and Julie both really liked the chocolate—I thought it was good but if a restaurant can’t get truffle cake right they should have their license taken away. I liked the goat cheese cheesecake, but after trying the one at 2941 a few days before, it was a bit lackluster.
Word on the street is that brunch is great at Bastille—I think it might be worth trying that, but dinner was pretty disappointing. Not only was the food just okay, the prices were pretty astronomical. It was over $100 for the three of us, and when we’re not ordering any main courses or alcohol, I hate to see what the bill would have turned in to on a full on date night. The meal wasn’t all bad though, I was really thrilled with the amount of parking. So, bravo on that!
