Article 268 of alt.restaurants: >From: richard@gryphon.COM (Richard Sexton) Newsgroups: alt.restaurants Subject: Harolds Keywords: pretty good Date: 6 Jun 89 20:52:35 GMT Organization: Trailing Edge Technology, Redondo Beach, Ca. By Richard Sexton and Trisha O Tuama Major funding for this review was made possible by a grant from the Usenet Community Trust. Review: Harold's in the Grand Hotel Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin Price: $50 per person with wine and dessert Rating: 3 to 3 1/4 stars Ambiance: Very Good Service: Very Good* Food: Very Good Milwaukee is not known as a bastion of French restaurants. German, sure, Polish, definitely, but frankly, there are only two listings in the Milwau- kee Yellow Pages under ``Restaurants - French'' and one of those has been disconnected and the other doesn't answer the phone. So we decided to go to Harold's which bills itself as a continental restau- rant. Plus it was very easy to find as it is in the hotel where we were staying plus it had been recommended to us as having the best food in city. We were presented with menus and asked if we would like to order wine. I suggested this might be easier accomplished if we had a wine list. The cat- alogues of wine and food were interesting, but anomalous. The entrees were priced perhaps slightly less than what I expected. The wines, however, at least the California ones, seemed expensive; for instance, they wanted $34 for a $9.00 bottle of Chandon. Conversely, the appetizers, soups and salads seemed underpriced. Perhaps this was to compensate for the wine prices. We started with two of us having the Scottish smoked salmon. They brought a filet and carved it at tableside. The potions were generous and excellent in taste. Two of us ordered soup for the next course. The gazpacho was very nice if you like cold soups -- I don't. My soup was oysters and scallops in cream with truffles and saffron. It was to die for. I'm no fan of oysters, espe- cially raw, but these were very fresh, tender, flavourful. The broth seemed to be little else than cream and a surprisingly large quantity of saffron and truffle shavings. It was a bargain at twice the price. Next two of us had salads as the third course. One was a house salad with the house dressing which resembled a creamy garlic more than anything else. I was more adventurous and ordered the peach and lobster salad: chunks of fresh peaches and Maine lobster on a bed of lettuce, covered in a pink dress- ing. Certainly peaches and lobster is not a combination I had tried before, but like lamb and currents, it is a union that clearly works. It was chilled a bit too much, however; it should have have been served 10-20 degrees warmer although the peaches were the main offender, being much colder than the lob- ster. Then the entrees began arriving; first a rack of lamb, which one of my com- panions had the dubious taste to order ``well done''. It did arrive in this unnatural state and was subsequently pronounced excellent. No doubt the chef shared my remorse at how this piece of meat had been ruined. The filet mignon arrived ``cooked to perfection''. No more needs to be said except that side orders of onion rings are a touch too midwestern for this kind of dish. My Maine lobster arrived. I had been presented with several cooking options including having it steamed, boiled or broiled. I'm not quite sure why you would want to boil one of these things and I speculated on the kind of person that would order a boiled lobster. I imagine it's the same kind of person who would order rack of lamb ``well done''. At any rate, the lobster was very nice - not excellent, it was a bit tougher than I am used to but still very good. For dessert we had ordered souffles. The menu stated that these had to be or- dered 30 minutes in advance and that there were three kinds: chocolate with chocolate sauce, raspberry with raspberry sauce, and Grand Marnier with Grand Marnier sauce. All three arrived promptly after dinner and thus began the Great Milwaukee Souffle Scandal. We didn't have any preference as to who got which souffle since we were plan- ning on sharing them. I ended up with the Grand Marnier and my friends were served the raspberry and chocolate ones. A voice arose: ``Uhh, there doesn't seem to be a lot of chocolate in this chocolate souffle''. I tasted it. It tasted the same as the Grand Marnier souffle. We alerted the waiter to this appalling situation and dared him to show us the chocolate souffle. He pointed to the Grand Marnier souffle on my plate. I said, "No, that one is the Grand Marnier." This left him with just two others from which to choose: the pinkish raspberry souffle and a second one that looked exactly like the Grand Marnier souffle sitting on my plate. Our waiter, no fool himself, quickly pointed to the second Grand Mar- nier souffle and pronounced it to be chocolate. We then asked him where the chocolate was as both the souffle and sauce were white to yellow in colour. He became agitated and asked if he might taste them. Not being the kind of folks to stand in the way of culinary investiga- tion, we allowed him to scoop up a spoonful of each which he then took into the kitchen to sample. Rather than report on the results of his experiment, however, he returned in a few minutes to explain that the chef hadn't used as much chocolate powder as usual, but that the sauce that accompanied the dish would activate what chocolate powder there was in the souffle. Now, Milwaukee is famous for many things, cheese, the Brewers, the brewers and Harry Stein's pawn shop, ``where the Who's Who of Milwaukee shops''. So perhaps this ``chocolate activation sauce'' is nothing more than a civic- minded attempt on behalf of our waiter to push Milwaukee ever higher on the list of what can best be described as Bogus Trick-the-Tourist Escapades. So we gave up. I mean, all of three us have had chocolate souffle on num- erous occasions. It's brown. And if our waiter is convinced that two white compounds mixed together will produce a chocolate flavour, who are we to con- tradict him ? A simple ``I'm sorry, we're out of chocolate souffle'' would have been suffi- cient. Or ``Oops, you got two Grand Marnier souffles by mistake!'' and we would have understood. But don't tell us about chocolate activation sauces. So, apart from a particularly arrogant waiter, it was a thoroughly enjoyable meal. Highly recomended. Both the food and atmosphere are above average. Caveat emptor, however. -- ``The who's who of Milwaukee only eats Ugandan pineapples'' richard@gryphon.COM decwrl!gryphon!richard gryphon!richard@elroy.jpl.NASA.GOV ------------------------------------------------------------ so what i want to know is what kind of peach activators there were in that PINK SAUCE . trisha (gazpacho/filet mignon/raspberry) o tuama