I think you must know

In the past have shared with you many of my favorite restaurants. I like to keep this blog positive, but after my dinner out last Friday, I feel I need to rant. Oh yes, we had a terribly mediocre, horribly overpriced dinner. The kind that hurts when you pay for it. This brought back memories of a few other dinners we've had like that. These are dining establishments in Seattle which, no matter how often you hear people say they just loved it, I want to you please heed my words and avoid them like the plague. My biggest disappointment list...

....Begins with last Friday when Raj and I decided to explore the new high end shopping center in Bellevue called The Braven . We should have been clued in when walking by the new Louis Vuitton store that The Bravern caters to people who like to pay waaay to much for low quality junk just to make themselves think it's luxury. We wanted to try something new, anyway, so we went to The Artisanal Brasserie, which apparently is an extremely popular restaurant in Manhattan (that totally blows my mind, because I always imagined that New Yorkers know when they're being taken) and the chef came here to open a new one. The menu was promising, and almost looked like the index for Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I ordered an onion tarte and Raj ordered steak tartare for starters, and we decided to share a cassoulet for an entree (after all, and $20 entree should be enough food for the two of us, right?). It all sounded fancy, but in the end, my "tarte" was caramelized onions on a pita, Raj's tartare was ground beef, and the cassoulet was unremarkable and so small that Raj also had to order soup to fill himself up. The worst part was that combined with two glasses of wine the bill came out to be $100. Don't get me wrong, we've paid that for a good dinner out before, but this was seriously twice as much as it should have been. Combine that with the fact that we saw the movie "2012" after, and you've got one bad date (except, of course, the man I was with)!

If you think $100 is a nauseating bill, a year or two ago we wanted to go "somewhere nice," so we decided to go to Crush at the recommendation of many supposed foodies we had talked to. This was a while ago, so I don't remember the details of what we ate. All I know is that I so badly wanted to love it- the pretentious white decor, the insanely slow service, the food that just didn't tickle me. I wished even more that we had enjoyed the experience when our $250 check came at the end of the meal. Live and learn, and never eat there again, am I right?

Other places to not eat:

The Space Needle Restaurant (total novelty)
Burgermaster (does this go without saying?)
Lark (I'm taking the advice of friends on this one. Some people swear it's their favorite restaurant, but based on my knowledge of our tastes I think we'll skip it)