Disharmony at Symphonie Restaurant

First impressions go a long way towards making it or breaking it for a restaurant. After all, if a restaurant doesn’t impress or at least show the potential for a good meal, customers won’t return.

The Symphonie Restaurant in Richmond, CA opened in February, 2009. Traveling through that area, we made a spontaneous decision to dine at Symphonie last week.

It was approaching dusk, so we couldn’t enjoy what appeared to be a charming and picturesque downtown. One nice point to dining outside of large cities — we did find easy and free parking in Symphonie’s parking lot.

The restaurant is a bit like the Doctor’s Tardis. It looms larger on the inside than it looks on the outside.

The restaurant is tastefully and pleasantly furnished. All the tables were prepared for the dinner crowd, complete with tablecloths, napkins, and place settings.

The only component missing were the customers. At 5 pm on a Sunday, we had our choice of seating in the restaurant.

The waitress seated us in the middle of the dining area, and explained that any items with the faux chicken were unavailable. When she asked, I shared it was our first visit to their restaurant.

Although it was only two pages, the menu was confusing. The first page was appetizers, salads, soups, fried rice, and noodle dishes. The second page was Lunch Specials (with soup, salad, and rice) and Specialties (with soup and salad). However, we could order from the Lunch Specials as a Dinner, but would not get the soup, salad, and rice and it would be a dinner portion.

We decided on an appetizer, Spring Rolls, and two entrees, Red Curry (from the Lunch Specials), and Mongolian Beef (from the Specialties), and brown rice.

The spring rolls were good (being vegan doesn’t mean I’ve lost my appreciation for fried foods), and interestingly, served with 2 dipping sauces. Only one of them appealed to both of us though.

The Red Curry was advertised as a curry and spicy, but neither of us found either of these qualities in the dish. The serving size was about average. The vegetables were well-cooked. I think the dish would have been better with a firmer tofu, rather than the big cubes of silken tofu. Unfortunately I saw potato with a big black spot right on the top. I know it happens with potatoes — it just needs to be cut-out before it’s cooked and served. It was huge, easily visible underneath the sauce. I guess the kitchen, in their haste to prepare 3 dishes for their only diners, missed it. And the sauce, it was about the right color for a curry but otherwise unremarkable.  (In fact, their curry came up lacking compared to a frozen entree dinner with a curry sauce we’d had earlier in that same week.)

As soon as we saw the Mongolian Beef , we realized we’d made a mistake in ordering it. We double-checked the description; it’s one of those dishes that restaurants bundle with rice automatically. So, priced at $11.50, with half the dish being rice, it was very overpriced for what it was. Taste-wise, it was okay but forgettable — nothing outstanding that made either of us crave to return anytime soon.

As for the actual rice that we ordered, not listed on the menu we received, I even have something to say about that. Quantity-wise, it appeared more like a serving of rice for one person, but cost-wise ($2.50) it was priced like rice for two. The rice served with the Mongolian Beef dish was larger than the amount of rice we ordered separately, so we had enough rice.

Frankly, though, after all that, the food wasn’t the most disappointing part of the meal. Or, maybe that should read instead

Surprisingly, though, after all that, the food wasn’t the most disappointing part of the meal.

It was a combination of the overall service and ambiance. The waitress did a good impression of a bad covert agent throughout our entire meal by fiddling with the existing place settings at the tables next to us — repeatedly adjusting the place settings, moving them back and forth between the same tables, straightening forks, and refolding napkins.

The cloth napkins are folded into a fan shape and decoratively placed on top of the plate. The plate is on a woven mat, on top of the tablecloth. Cutlery is placed directly on the woven mat. On my way to the restroom, while still in the main dining area, I walked by a laundry cart. It was holding a hamper filled with discarded table linens and a package of new ones. I didn’t see any discarded or fresh mats on the laundry cart. Since it’s woven, it’s easier for food particles to get caught within the slats. And it would be too incongruous for a restaurant promoting ‘Go Green’ to be treating them as disposable mats. At that point, I didn’t want to think too hard about how/if they clean the mats between diners.  I just wished they placed clean cutlery on the napkins, as most restaurants do.

The restaurant is nicely furnished inside, and very big. On the main dining floor, there is a separate bar area, as well as another empty counter/bar area. The furniture is all dark wood. When we were there, they had soft music unobtrusively playing in the background. But (you knew it was coming) that was completely drowned out by the lively conversation and light footfalls of two young children affiliated with the restaurant staff. The kids were, well, kids in their playful and creative banter and shouting, which was easily overheard throughout the entire dining area.

We had already agreed that if the waitress asked us at the end of the meal how it was, we would be truthful with her. But perhaps she had already (over)heard enough, because she didn’t ask when she presented the check.

As we got ready to leave, we noticed we were still the only customers in the entire restaurant.

Interestingly, the saga with the meal didn’t end when we walked out. The next day, after reviewing some of the photographs I’d taken of our dinner there, I discovered Symphonie had overcharged us by $1 on the spring rolls, and there was another unexplained 0.75 charge on the bill. The real total was $32.82 (tax included) but the restaurant charged us $34.74.

I wanted Symphonie to impress me, to be a wonderful vegan restaurant that I could rave about and encourage everyone to visit, but they didn’t. Instead, I left wondering how on earth they’ve managed to stay open for nearly a year.

Tags:east bay, restaurant, review, richmond, vegan