Dolphin’s Dock

I don’t think I have what it takes to be a trendy sophisticated socialite. A friend of ours was playing with a jazz group at some little swanky jazz club about an hour away (our city wouldn’t have enough potential patrons to support such a thing), so we headed out there. It was a fun night and the music was superb, but this place was trying way too hard.

It was decorated beautifully with a sorta chic industrial/modern look. You know, exposed aging brick walls, with everything else super sleek and loads of brushed metal. I dug the look of the place until the first trip to the bathroom which took the look to the point of being a parody of itself. Seriously, they had metallic tiles running halfway up the way up the wall to meet a series of mirrored surfaces divided by rectangles of brushed metal. The two pieces of artwork were long skinny photographs that were close-up of eyes (because the bathroom is really a place where you want to feel like you’re being watched?), and the sinks were those kinds with the plateaus in the middle that look real nice until you go to use them and find that it’s impossible to wash your hands without splashing water all over the counter.

A first glance at the menu revealed no prices (which seems to be the startling new trend), but upon closer examination the prices were there only it seems the dollar sign has fallen out of favor so everything was listed like “Shrimp Noodle Soup /15″ (instead of “Shrimp Noodle Soup – $15.00″). Of course the numbers following the slash tended to be predominantly more in the 25-60 range, that’s per plate without your beverage (in fairness, this place did boast of a 5-star chef so their prices were not bizarrely high for restaurants of that caliber, just bizarrely high compared to the places we usually eat). Before the slash, it seemed they had had trouble deciding if their menus were going to represent a fine dining establishment with formal description of each dish or a more trendy coffeeshop-like feel with some clever Web 2.0-ish remark, and they frequently switched description styles from one menu item to the next.

Needless to say, with those prices, we chose to skip dinner. We did find out that if we ate, we didn’t have to pay the cover and the desserts were only $2 (or should I say “/2″) more than the cover charge so in a sense we could each get a dessert for 2 bucks. I got the cheesecake. If we’re operating on the assumption that (by ignoring what I would have paid as cover) dessert only cost me $2, then I’d say I paid about a buck per square inch of cheesecake. That didn’t stop them from bringing it out a 15″ plate though. TheBoyfriend™ got sorbet which came in four scoops (each about the diameter of a quarter and in flavors such as “Apple Cider”), and another friend who was with us got some little golf-ball sized cube of chocolate cake with some kind of cream drizzled out to the side (presumably for no other purpose than to at least appear to be using the foot long rectangular plate it was served on).

We didn’t dare risk a cocktail lest we have to take out a small loan, so we opted for the (surprisingly free) “filtered tap water.” It was all I could do to keep from laughing hysterically as waiter brought out a bottle of tap water and momentarily presented it to us as if it were a fine wine before gingerly pouring it into our glasses.

Despite the waiter more or less ignoring us after it became clear we weren’t gonna spend half a paycheck on one meal, it really was a fair bit of fun but I can’t imagine (other than for the music) going there for any reason other than to laugh at the pretentiousness of it all.