Reviews for The Shallows Restaurant

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 Crí¨me Brulí© dessert was little better. It tasted good enough but the top caramel layer was only slightly firm, having seen precious little of the Flambí© 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.