Baieta in the 5th was one of the astonishing openings this year. Building on her spectacular career at the Fables......., Julia Sedefdjian had a dazzling place here, until, until, I don’t know.
We entered way later than we should have, but that’s no excuse for the lack of menus in French, slow service, spilled broth, pouring me a sip of wine but only giving the rest of the table real glasses full, no towels in the toilet and a huge overcharge. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The 29€ for two dish “menu” looked great to all of us, so each of us ordered two dishes. After a long wait to order and get menus in French, we started with an amuse of focaccia with olives, anchovies and onions with the spilled broth (which tasted like water with thyme added), followed by one order of a perfect egg on bits of haddock and one of confited poulpe with a spicy broth.
Then two of us had the aoili of lieu jaune and two had the bouillabaieta, which frankly, while consisting of fresh fish, were astonishingly boring.
We settled on three desserts: a creme coco, creme financiere and pear, once again really blah.
Our bill arrived. It was stratospheric. As a confirmed coward, I would have just paid and groused afterwards, but my fellow blogger was outraged “what do you mean, xxx€?, we each ordered 2 dishes, 4 people x 29€ = 116€ plus two wines @ 64€ plus 3 coffees at 12€ and an extra dessert 11€? No way.” “Oh, I guess we forgot to tell you that not everything was on the 29€ “Lunch menu”." Rush to the back. Recalculation. Ok, it’ll be 244€ or 122€ a couple instead of 203€ or 101.50€ a couple. Outrageous, but what are you going to do?
Go back? Never.
Boldly answering your inquiry from last week pertaining to our opinions on bad reviews, you do your readers a service by publishing a review like this.
Posted by: Mark H. | October 02, 2018 at 09:58 PM