Question of the Day - 24 September 2022

Good question.

When it opened in mid-August at Paris, a flood of breathless coverage deluged print, wif-fi, and airwaves, from BonAppetit to Delish.com, from FoodandWine.com to "Good Morning America." All the reports touched the same bases: Martha's first bona fide restaurant, designed by herself to resemble her own country farmhouse, the seasonal menu of high-quality ingredients from various purveyors, the signature cocktails, the copper pots hanging in the open-air kitchen, the patio dining. And the invited guests commented on all the free food they scarfed at the media events, which we deem unreliable at best and corrupt at worst.

When it comes to food writers actually eating there and paying the freight as regular patrons, it's been a little sparse. We've seen two reviews, one in the Washington Post,  the other in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. 

One of the R-J food writers, Jonathan Wright, took a friend to try the three- to four-pound roast chicken, at $90 the most expensive item on the menu, except for the 32-ounce bone-in rib eye ($160) and buckwheat crêpes with Osetra caviar (one ounce $100). The chicken is stuffed with breadcrumbs (we hope they're fancy) and comes with sprigs of rosemary, though Wright says it can feed two easily and possibly three. The side dishes, such as baked potato, potato puree, fries, corn and jalapeno pudding, and seared peppers, are $16 each.

"Martha’s chickens come from D’Artagnan, the posh supplier of organic, antibiotic-free, and hormone-free meats. Most importantly: It’s delicious. The folks in the kitchen are poultry poobahs, their birds emerging crisp, moist, salty, fatty — in just the right amounts."

The Washington Post food critic, Richard Morgan, is a Martha fan, calling her "the undisputed goddess of domesticity." Commenting on the Martha-tini, neither he nor his dining companion "could recall a better martini and, um, it wasn’t for lack of experience." They also loved the crab cake ($33), which "avoids the laziness of being a lump of overly deep-fried crab chunks and instead offers a true recipe of crab meat wrapped in a barely there breaded crust," as well as the whole roasted chicken, "brined overnight to be finished in a brick pizza oven."

However, "The salmon en croûte was nearly inedible," described by Morgan's dinner companion as “the world’s worst sushi roll, too wet on the inside and too dry on the outside.” Similarly, "The oysters Rockefeller swung so heavily spinach-forward that they might’ve been prepared by Olive Oyl for her dearest Popeye. And the caipirinha, Stewart’s favorite cocktail, was overwhelmingly sour."

The service, as to be expected, was uniformly excellent. 

That's all we've seen as far as professional reviews go.

On Yelp as of this writing, 67 comments average 4.5 stars and we searched for "amazing," finding it 10 times. Scrolling through, we saw "perfect," "inspired," "delicious," "authentic," "awesome," and "worth it!"

But then there are the less-than-five-star reviews. One agreed with Richard Morgan: "The oysters Rockefeller were absolutely terrible."

And here's an interesting comment: "We were told that Alexis's chopped salad ($26) is a tribute to Martha's daughter. After trying it, we came to the combined conclusion that she's probably not the biggest fan of her daughter."

We couldn't find a single review that had anything bad to say about the chicken, which is what we'll try, along with a crab cake, baked potato, and corn pudding, if we ever get there.

All in all, it seems to us to be a mixed, though mostly positive (and expensive), experience. It's probably worth trying once and if you're suitably impressed, you can go back. Otherwise, you can say you did it -- for what looks to us like around $200 for two on the frugal side.