Mr. Rabbit and I had a light dinner at Caren’s this evening.

We sat at the bar and ordered a bottle of wine, the stilton burger for Mr., and two appetizers for me: the seared tuna, and a house salad (dressing on the side).

The food arrived. Burger looked stunning. Tuna was lovely. But the salad arrived without the advertised goat cheese — which means that it was basically a little heap of mixed greens with some ground flax seed and two slivery roasted red pepper strips. I noted the missing cheese and the owner quickly and happily dispatched the salad to the kitchen to fix it. Fine. Halfway through the salad, I hit a seriously rotten lettuce blob… like the kind where you’re not sure if you want the salad anymore. So our server apologized and took the salad away. He brought out another, but this one was dressed (recall that I had ordered dressing on the side). So it went back again. By this time Mr. Rabbit had finished his burger, and I had finished my tuna. But I was definitely still hungry, so I put back the fourth salad… and it was very nice.

Then the cheque came… a reasonable $80 for a bottle of wine, burger, tuna AND the salad?!? We spent the walk home debating: What should have happened? “Should” I have been charged for this salad? If this were your restaurant, what would you have done?

I like this place, and I’ve otherwise talked it up on foodie boards. And the burger was fabulous (stilton-stuffed, mushrooms sauteed in cognac… really, really “all that”), plus my tuna was wonderful, sesame seed crusted on a lovely savory salad of tomato and bok choy. But all we talked about was the stupid salad and how they could have handled it better. I think it’s a real shame that this otherwise great meal was ruined by Rabbit’s bad salad.

Posted on June 26th, 2007 by rabbit
Filed under: Toronto, Restaurant Reviews