Imagine just getting out of a mediocre culinary sc...

Imagine just getting out of a mediocre culinary school, visiting a three star restaurant in Paris with amazingly creative and well crafted dishes, and opening a restaurant with the goal of emulating that food. What you would get would be highly creative, but poorly executed dishes. That's what I got at Chez TJ last year. My meal started off with a foie gras and peanut butter madeline cookie as the amuse bouche. Which, in simple terms, is a dog treat, a really gross dog treat. Sadly the meal wasn't significantly uphill from there. The majority of the dishes my wife and I got were far more creative than they were tasty. In fact, only two of the dozen or so things we ate we would ever want to eat again. Oh, and the service matched the food. It seemed that each of the four or five waiters who delivered the courses was well trained in mumbling the descriptions of the dishes. So half the time, we didn't even know what exactly we were getting. Also, we got the shorter tasting menu and our meal still took almost three hours. There was a period of almost 40 minutes between courses. Terrible. How on earth this place got a Michelin star is beyond me. The meal I had there wasn't just bad for a Michelin starred restaurant, it was objectively terrible. Does my review seem harsh? Maybe. I know that other people have gone to Chez TJ and not been fed dog treats, but with plenty of high-end restaurants in the bay area, I (and you) have no reason to give them a second chance.