The sequel to State Bird Provisions, The Progress, opened a few weeks ago. A friend of mine, Zito, who I got a few difficult reservations for before, asked me if I could get him a reservation at The Progress, thinking I had some special way to get reservations. Really, my method is kind of lame. I don't own bots who can read those security words or numbers, nor do I have any chums in the restaurant industry who can get me any reservation I want. I do have a few people I could contact that could possibly help, but I've never really tried those leads before. Anyhow, when I read about The Progress opening, I pretty much kept myself on the OpenTable reservation site, and kept refreshing, and VOILA! I scored myself a couple of reservations (at bad times though), one which I gave away, and one which I decided to treat myself to a meal I thought I probably would not enjoy that much. Now, I don't want to say I went to dine there thinking the food would suck - it is more of a I-went-to-State-Bird-twice-and-tried-to-like-it-but-didn't-so-I-think-the-style-is-not-for-me thing.
Anyway here goes.
The restaurant was behind a nondescript door that really could have been an office or something, but the street number corresponded with the address, so in we went. I liked the design of the restaurant itself, tolerably well spaced, out, somewhat modern with a warehouse feel, with two upstairs dining areas. We were brought to one of them.
The menu was family style, and the price for 6 items was $65/person. Any additional item would be $10/person. I'm a fan of family style dining, but the fact was you could not get more dishes and smaller quantities of food per person, which I'm quite into. But fine. Here were our choices, and we actually got both the desserts not checked off in the menu which was quite nice (they allow you to split only the dessert order). The menu had a lot of words we did not understand. For example, ridgeback. So our friend Googled it, and came up with pictures of dogs. Hmm. We later found out it was prawns, and it became one of our selection. Now, I had been intrigued by pig fries, from all the reviews on Yelp, thinking it was fries fried in pig fat, which really should have sounded disgusting but did not. Later found out it was ears and cartilage and all that stuff fried to a crisp, and glad the table passed on that.
So, we got our food. The lighting was poor, and for some reason I decided to photograph the squab with flash, so that one seems to stand out. Well, to sum it up, many of the flavours seemed foreign, if I had to name it I would say Scandinavian. Earlier this year, I went to Iceland, Norway and Sweden, and I can safely say I did not love the Scandinavian flavours of Iceland nor Norway all that much. The Swedish Swedish (yes I meant to write it twice - Lingon likes to correct my writing for typos and misspellings and grammatical errors) food tasted better, though it was like reindeer meat which tasted like pork in cream sauce (how can that taste wrong?!) and salmon cake (layers of smoked salmon which was not foul like some other Scandinavian smoked salmon I have tasted, shrimp, etc.) which tasted like flavours of home that I'm familiar with. Well, I did not like this meal.
It is not my style to be super descriptive about what I ate, and I think that's rather boring and takes a long time, so instead I decide to bore you with why I write what I write. Lol. Anyway, the squab tasted the best of everything, and I also enjoyed the super rich chocolate ice cream, particularly for the olive oil flavour, but everything else was...
(Thanks for the photo, Zito.)
Having said that, most of the table liked the meal better than I did. The feedback was they would not make a special trip there, but if someone said he/she wanted to visit, they would go along and dine there again. So, like I said, it probably is just me. No thanks, Progress, or State Bird, our love affair is over.
Anyway here goes.
The restaurant was behind a nondescript door that really could have been an office or something, but the street number corresponded with the address, so in we went. I liked the design of the restaurant itself, tolerably well spaced, out, somewhat modern with a warehouse feel, with two upstairs dining areas. We were brought to one of them.
The menu was family style, and the price for 6 items was $65/person. Any additional item would be $10/person. I'm a fan of family style dining, but the fact was you could not get more dishes and smaller quantities of food per person, which I'm quite into. But fine. Here were our choices, and we actually got both the desserts not checked off in the menu which was quite nice (they allow you to split only the dessert order). The menu had a lot of words we did not understand. For example, ridgeback. So our friend Googled it, and came up with pictures of dogs. Hmm. We later found out it was prawns, and it became one of our selection. Now, I had been intrigued by pig fries, from all the reviews on Yelp, thinking it was fries fried in pig fat, which really should have sounded disgusting but did not. Later found out it was ears and cartilage and all that stuff fried to a crisp, and glad the table passed on that.
So, we got our food. The lighting was poor, and for some reason I decided to photograph the squab with flash, so that one seems to stand out. Well, to sum it up, many of the flavours seemed foreign, if I had to name it I would say Scandinavian. Earlier this year, I went to Iceland, Norway and Sweden, and I can safely say I did not love the Scandinavian flavours of Iceland nor Norway all that much. The Swedish Swedish (yes I meant to write it twice - Lingon likes to correct my writing for typos and misspellings and grammatical errors) food tasted better, though it was like reindeer meat which tasted like pork in cream sauce (how can that taste wrong?!) and salmon cake (layers of smoked salmon which was not foul like some other Scandinavian smoked salmon I have tasted, shrimp, etc.) which tasted like flavours of home that I'm familiar with. Well, I did not like this meal.
It is not my style to be super descriptive about what I ate, and I think that's rather boring and takes a long time, so instead I decide to bore you with why I write what I write. Lol. Anyway, the squab tasted the best of everything, and I also enjoyed the super rich chocolate ice cream, particularly for the olive oil flavour, but everything else was...
(Thanks for the photo, Zito.)
Having said that, most of the table liked the meal better than I did. The feedback was they would not make a special trip there, but if someone said he/she wanted to visit, they would go along and dine there again. So, like I said, it probably is just me. No thanks, Progress, or State Bird, our love affair is over.
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ReplyDeleteHi Paulina, you may contact me at michelle@simply-events.net. :-)
DeleteThanks so much! I'll email you.
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