I love being here and having the customer decide where I eat every night. It’s the bane of a food blogger’s existence. Because you blog about food, everyone expects you to decide where to eat. So when I don’t have to do that, it’s a luxury that I enjoy. So this night, we went to the Hotel Trezzo in Via Sala. Inside, there’s a restaurant called La Cantina. It was quite busy there this night. There was nowhere to park and the proper restaurant was full. But we were able to get a seat sort of in the hallway.

In Italy, they give you bread and such, or other little bites to eat with your meal, but you get charged for it. It’s all part of “service” and this includes the bread as well as the service charge. It’s a flat fee per person, so it doesn’t matter how cheap or expensive your meal is, you get the charge regardless. This is another restaurant with quite a small menu. A little pasta, some rice, and lots of meat dishes. Oh, and another thing, I love all the frizzante water here.

S got the lamb dish, which came out in little skewers. Lamb and potatoes, quite palatable for anyone, foreign or native.

I got the chicken dish that was listed in their “specialty” section. It was thinly sliced chicken breast with a sauce made with whiskey, wine, prosecco and porcini mushrooms.  It was served with a “cornmeal porridge”, but it just seemed like polenta to me. In the english menu, it said porridge. But I’m not really sure if it was indeed polenta, because really, if it was, they should have just called it polenta, right? It had little bits of fried bacon on top! Whoo! The dinner was lovely. I can’t stop saying that since I’m working with Scots all day!

I was in a random town about an hour outside of Detroit, where the food choices are between Arby’s, McDonald’s, or Coney Island. I wasn’t feeling that, so I took a short drive to Ann Arbor to check out one of America’s finest college towns. It’s adorable and so studious. Roaming around, I ended up at Mercy’s. It’s brand new, and part of a hotel. It’s a french restaurant, with burmese and other asian influences. Sounds interesting, huh? Ok, so I have to start with this bread. It was like simply amazing. It was just thin slices of some sourdough bread. Super crusty on the outside, super dense and lovely on the inside. They get it from Chicago. Where is this bread from? Because I could eat this all day. Looks like every day ordinary bread, tastes like nirvana.

I started with the Mercy’s Steamed Dumplings. They’re made with ground dumplings, which makes them a bit more healthy. When they come out, they bring out the bamboo steamer and then put them on a plate for you. They’re served with ginger soy and spicy chili dipping sauces. This means they put some dumpling sauce in a bowl and squeeze some sriracha in another bowl. These were pretty good, but the innards also had pieces of water chestnuts in them, which made the insides sometimes crunchy. I actually do not like water chestnuts at all, especially their texture, so that part of the dumplings, I did not care for.

I also added the Asian Slaw as a side to my entree. It was a blend of Napa cabbage, red pepper, green onion, and corn in a sesame ginger vinaigrette. I absolutely loved this. I’m a huge sucker for super crunchy cabbage based salads. I can’t get enough! I could have eaten a giant bowl of this as my main course. They’re really fancy about presentation too. It was served in a little fried wonton skin basket.

My entree was the Coriander Dusted Sea Scallops. Large scallops are served with jasmine confetti rice cake, citrus ginger beurre blanc, orange curry coconut glacé, balsamic paint, and green beans. That’s a lot of fancy words. The scallops were great, but I wasn’t necessarily crazy about the citrus ginger buerre blanc they slathered on top of them. But they were cooked well, seared on the outside, pretty raw in the middle. The rice was not very good. It was heavy on coconut milk and fairly flavorless. The balsamic paint was a dramatic touch to the dish itself, and I loved the green beans.

The service was ok. The food took forever to come out. And there weren’t very many people there, so I don’t know what was up. Maybe they’re just still trying to figure it out, as they’ve only been open for a little while. Or maybe they’re just slow. This place is a fancier and more expensive alternative, in an otherwise college dining scene, where your only options are sandwiches, wings, or burgers.

With Restaurant Week going on, there were several other restaurants that were having special deals. One of these happened to be London Grill. To thank frequent diners, they offered a special $18.95 Meal Deal of fresh maine lobster or filet of beef. This seemed like such a deal! Lobster or Filet for $18.95? Well, it didn’t quite live up to what they made it out to be.

I had gotten an email announcing the deal and it promised fresh maine lobster or filet of beef. When we got there, the little menu card now said fresh maine half lobster or filet of beef. That was fallacy number one. Well fine, we decided to go for it anyway. It mentioned nothing about how it was prepared, but we envisioned half a lobster sitting on a plate with some veggies. Well, first we got some complimentary mushrooms and bread. For someone who’s not that into mushrooms, these were surprisingly tasty! And the bread was a focaccia, also tasty. We got a house salad, which was just fine. No choice of dressing or anything, you just get what they give you. R wanted a caesar salad and they brought her out a caesar one, without any additional charge. That was pretty cool of them.

When we got the fresh maine half lobster, we actually got a bowl with whole wheat spaghetti, topped with a lobster claw, with some additional lobster meat thrown into it. Not at all what we expected. It tasted fine, but we didn’t expect a spaghetti dinner. We expected a lobster dinner. The spaghetti was also extremely garlicky and slightly spicy, which I didn’t mind, but others may. I don’t know about you, but when I envision lobster dinner, a bowl of spaghetti ain’t it.

For dessert, it was chocolate mousse. For someone who’s not all that into chocolate or mousse, I still liked this a lot. So kudos on the chocolate mousse. But no kudos for the fact that I came here to get a particular drink and they didn’t have the beer it that was required to make it. If you put a drink on the menu, then make sure you have all the components with which to make it. 99% of the reasons I even went to London Grill was to get this drink, and they didn’t even have it. Fallacy number 2.

The service… oh, the service. Our server tried, she really did, but she just wasn’t very good. She wasn’t good at explaining, she wasn’t good at imparting information, she just wasn’t very good at being a server. I suggest she look into another line of work.

At the end of the day, the meal was fine, and for getting three courses, it is a deal, but it’s not one that I could recommend. They don’t quite tell you what the deal is, and that’s how they sucker you in. They promise lobster and give you mostly lobster bits. So I’m going to have to say skip it!