Zephyr (Sucks)
About an hour ago I got back from one of the worst meals that I have had at a restaurant in a few years. Friends and I went to Zephyr as part of the recent Restaurant Week in Boston. I booked our reservation later than I had hoped so Zephyr was one of the few spots left (that I had interest in going to) that still had space available. After tonight's meal I can see why they had space available.
I used to do a lot of business travel. I've eaten in a lot of hotel restaurants. Most of those restaurants are passable and the rest were exceptional (famous in their own right in fact). I now have to add a third category to hotel restaurants of which Zephyr is the first entry and that is horrible.
The evening started off with a 20 minute wait before anyone came by to even get our drink order. By this time we had all decided that we would be having the restaurant week special menu along with what we wanted to drink. It was a good 10 minutes before our drinks arrived. They also brought out bread at some point with cold solid butter in the little foil wraps. Eventually when the salads arrived I don't know how much longer that was they didn't serve them all in the same type of container. Four of them were in some medieval chamber pot looking bowl while the other two were on a plate. The salad was okay. The bread was better (minus the butter).
A good 45 minutes passed between getting our salad and the manager coming by to inform us that the kitchen was backed up and that it would be a wait for the entree. As a consolation he offered a free round of drinks. About 10 minutes later our entrees finally arrived. After eating for a while John noticed that his chicken seemed a little raw. Inspecting mine I also noticed the same issue. It was stuffed chicken, the problem was half of both sides around the stuffing was still bright pink, having looked like it was barely heated at all, let alone cooked enough to be safe to eat. We informed our waiter which prompted the manager to swing by again, at which point he offered to take to of the entrees off of the bill.
At this point it was time for dessert. Granted it had now been about 2 hours that we had been at the restaurant. I'm all for a nice relaxing dinner, peppered with good wine and conversation, but I usually expect it to be more of an enjoyable experience than this night was turning out to be. When they finally served dessert two of the cheesecakes didn't have any strawberry/raspberry topping on the cheesecake of which mine was one of them. I cared not to complain since I really just wanted to leave. The fruit included with the dessert was yummy, but by this point I'd mostly lost my appetite.
If my memory serves me correctly I've also eaten brunch at Zephyr once before and was underwhelmed by it. With this night's experience I see no reason to ever go back.