Oh Chez TJ, how you disappoint me so.

Oh Chez TJ, how you disappoint me so.

Let me just preface this review with a disclaimer that it will come off as snobby and entitled. But I stand by my perspective on our dining experience.

The main reason for my 2-star review is the service, which I'll talk about first. The food deserves 4 stars though the wine pairing was extremely over priced and didn't deliver on value, but for a Michelin starred restaurant, I expected a better overall experience.

My fiance made a reservation to celebrate our engagement (we literally got engaged earlier that day). He may have forgotten to let them know beforehand, I'm not sure. But we certainly told our server when he asked "are we celebrating a special occasion?" ("yes, we're celebrating our engagement", "oh, how wonderful, congratulations!")

So you can imagine my surprise when the meal ended with nothing special from the restaurant. Mind you, the other three tables in our room all got a special dessert and *hand-written* card from the chef for their birthdays/anniversaries. Umm what? It wouldn't have been as jarring if no one else got special treatment. Is an engagement not worthy of celebration? Okay okay, maybe it was because the chef didn't have enough notice to prepare something (which I find hard to believe... how hard is it to write "congratulations" in chocolate on a plate?), but they could've at least comped a glass of champagne or something as a gesture. But nope, there was nothing.

Aside from that major oversight, the other weird service error was that we didn't even get napkins until we asked for it during our first course. At first I thought it was because we might not need napkins for the amuse bouche. But when the bread came, I was like, umm we need napkins. Add that to our weird table placement, it really felt like they didn't have room for us for the night and hurriedly squeezed a table for us against a wall.

Okay the food. The amuse bouche were all great. Very good flavors and interesting combinations. The brioche with dungeness crab was possibly my favorite course. Who knew frying brioche with butter and cheese would taste so good! The bread was amazing, as well, I think I had like 4 slices. The pasta dish and the risotto were delicious too. Desserts were fine but nothing to write home about. Food deserves a solid 4 stars. Not the best tasting menu I've ever had, but I would go back again.

Now the wine pairing. Really the tl;dr is, it is not worth it! For $150, you don't get a lot of wine and they didn't actually pair well with the food. I think I only enjoyed 1 out of 4 or 5. The wine with the dessert pairing was awful. I was not impressed and felt painful when the bill came.