This restaurant has been reported as permanently closed. Click here if it has reopened.
Delivery
No
Payment
Accepts Credit Cards
Parking
Good for Kids
Attire
Casual
Alcohol
Reservations
Cuisines:
Canadian
Price Point
$$
$ - Cheap Eats (Under $10)
$$ - Moderate ($11-$25)
$$$ - Expensive ($25-$50)
$$$$ - Very Pricey (Over $50)
WiFi
No
Outdoor Seats
*This restaurant has closed. If this restaurant is open or has reopened, just let us know.
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12/27/2014 - Jay Hunt
We have gone to Shallows for their Christmas dinner buffet for the last several years and always enjoyed it. This year with a new chef, they dropped the buffet and went with a table d' hote menu. It was a huge disappointment. Before going, I had decided on the prime rib of beef and my wife in the Cornish hen. However, since my wife was also interested in a traditional turkey meal, I asked the waitress if it was carved from a fresh bird or sliced from a turkey roll. She assured us it was carved from a bird so we opted for it instead. I ordered all dark meat, my wife all white. What a mistake!
The first course choice was a Caesar salad or vanilla parsnip soup. My wife’s salad was an uninspiring lettuce salad with a small hard slice of bread and half slice of bacon on top and two whole garlic cloves on the side. The soup was tasty enough but full of the strings I despised when eating parsnip as a child.
The first clue that the turkey was not as advertised was that the stuffing under the meat came as a perfectly round patty that looked as if it had been sliced from a tin. The meat was so precisely cut that it must have been done by a meat slicer, not a carving knife. It had an outer layer of moist fatty skin, not at all crisp and brown, again smacking of a prepackaged roll. It tasted like no turkey I had ever eaten before. It tasted like it had been left out too long at room temperature and allowed to begin to spoil and I couldn't eat it. My wife couldn’t eat hers either. The gravy was thin and tasteless like it had been made from a packaged mix. The mashed potatoes were dull and two young carrots placed on top of a mound of shredded cabbage surrounded by a thin cucumber strip were the best part of the plate.
The Bourbon Vanilla Bean Crème Brulé dessert was little better. It tasted good enough but the top caramel layer was only slightly firm, having seen precious little of the Flambé torch.
After dinner, I spoke to the manager and told her how disappointed we were. She apologized and gave us a small discount off our meal, explaining that they had replaced the annual buffet with the table d' hote menu to give the new chef (who had been there barely a month) time to adjust to his new job.
Until they make huge improvements in the kitchen and bring back the Christmas buffet, we won’t be back again.
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