My wife and I recently got the chance to go out for dinner without our daughter for the first time in about five months, but neither of us was interested in heading downtown, so our options for a nicer meal were somewhat limited. We decided to try Porcini’s, an Italian restaurant in Watertown very close to our favorite little restaurant in the area, Strip-T’s.
It was a mistake.
The main meal was fair; my wife liked her veal saltimbocca, but my veal piccata wasn’t pounded thin enough and the sauce was very tart, meaning that it didn’t have enough butter to balance out the acidity. But the gigantic failure on Porcini’s part was their tiramisu, which we decided to split. It looked like it was done correctly, but after one bite each, we realized that the cheese-custard was sour. It overwhelmed the taste of the dessert, and I thought they might have skimped on the ingredients by using cream cheese instead of mascarpone (an imported Italian cheese that has a texture similar to American cream cheese, but a much milder and smoother taste). So I asked the waitress if there was cream cheese in it. She asked the chef, and came back to tell us that yes, the tiramisu contained a “mixture” of cream cheese and mascarpone (which I took to mean that it had 98% cream cheese and 2% mascarpone). I pointed out that that “wasn’t exactly traditional,” and she just shrugged her shoulders.
She didn’t take it off the bill. I took it out of her tip.
And for what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of any restaurant that cuts corners on ingredients. I don’t care how good your chef is; if the ingredients suck, so will the finished product. Porcini’s cuts corners on ingredients. That’s a dealbreaker for me.
My wife pointed out that we should have just gone to Strip-T’s, which is a much more casual, mom-and-pop type of restaurant that specializes in ridiculously fresh fish. We wanted to do something a little more upscale, but as often as not, upscale just means a higher price, not a better meal.