review: the worst service of my life (silks)

alright, so i'm actually backdating this post, but this happened on the 13th, so the 13th the post will be dated. this is just a quick review of restaurant week at silks, which is the restaurant at the stonehedge inn in tyngsboro (tyngsboro?!). i have mixed feelings about silks.

the restaurant is basically a hunting lodge. a very nice one, but a hunting lodge nonetheless. it's what you expect the oak room to look like - i've never actually been to the oak room, but this is what i imagine: dark wood paneling, high ceilings, paintings of men with dogs and guns in the realist style.

so we were greeted by some guy with a really overdone french accent - he had a real french accent and was playing it up for the guests, i guess. well, buddy, i took french all throughout college and i don't appreciate your fakeness! ugh. so pretentious. i also hate it when the waitstaff assumes you're some peon who walked in off the street and doesn't know anything about food. they may not actually think this, but if that's how they make you feel, they're dirt in my book.

now in regards to the digs, they were really nice despite all the hunting lodge references. the chairs were nice and plushy, the napkins were this nice shade of gray, and were softer than any napkins i've ever had at a restaurant.

and in terms of food i had a duck confit with a frisee salad, citrus vinaigrette, and a few raspberries. really good - very simply done, and very well done. the confit was shredded and formed into little upside-down-muffin shapes. it was a bit hard to eat, but in the end it was fine, and the addition of the raspberry added a really nice acidic balance to the heavy duck fat-ness of the confit.

for the main course i had steak with um...i think it had some vegetables with it. the vegetables were unmemorable, but this was the first hunk of meat i'd had since china, where everything's bite size, and as such it was really fantastic. they messed up and gave my mother my steak - i ordered mine rare, she ordered hers medium, but i got the medium. it was fine in the end. the meat has great flavor, and a good amount of chew, and was really beautiful - seared on the outside, all red on the inside.

dessert was so-so. we all had the chocolate mousse, which was encased in puff pastry, with a pile of poached peaches on the side. the peaches tasted like canned peaches (and looked like them too), and weren't integrated into the dessert, so i don't know what that was about. anyone who has eaten cold puff pastry knows how gross it is - the desserts had been thawed too fast, so the layer of chocolate on top of the puff pastry was cracked, and the puff pastry was still pretty cold. the mousse inside was pretty good, though - nice consistency, but i don't really like milk chocolate mousse.

so now we get to my real gripe about this place. the service was the most awful service i have ever had in my life. we suffered from having too many different waitstaff - not too many waitstaff, but too many different waitstaff. they incorrectly gave us silverware for our appetizers, didn't notice when we switched, gave us the wrong appetizers. oops. they apologized. then it happened again for the main course. they even got the wineglasses wrong. now, this is just unacceptable. at such a nice (and expensive) restaurant this is a cardinal sin in my book. good thing we all got the same dessert, because they couldn't mess that up.

my general verdict is that the waitstaff is so inept and pretentious that the prevalence of french accents can't possibly make up for the poor service. unless you have millions of dollars and come draped in fur stoles, i would stay away from this place.