the company dime was rocked mightily

Bistro 100
(Tyron and Trade Street, Charlotte NC)





Stumbled into this place during my perambulations about uptown (I've learned my lesson about wandering out of the sight of tall buildings in this town...). It seemed like a decent enough restaurant, cozy and lively with the pre-theater dinner crowd.

Ever a fan of antisocially pungent foods, I was ecstatic when presented with an entire bulb of oven roasted garlic to spread onto my allotment of bread. But delight quickly turned into dismay as I tasted garlic that was, ironically, almost completely devoid of garlic flavor. The garlic was roasted until it attained the color and almost the consistency of peanut butter, but much of the bracing spiciness was lost in the process, supplanted by a bland, faint sweetness. I soon abandoned the garlic, hoping the meal can be saved with a well-executed entree.



Unfortunately I was disappointed in the main course as well, the seared scallops with saffron basmati rice. The presentation was quite fetching, a tidy little tower of sunnily hued rice topped with a daub of red sauce and girded about the base with spinach, and the scalloped projecting forth from the tower in four directions. The scallops were exemplary, panfried to form a thin, slightly charred, salty crust enclosing the hot juicy flesh. The rice however, was prepared without respect to the inherent qualities of the basmatic rice, its aromatic airy fluffiness lost as the rice was cooked with too much moisture then compacted. The sauce, a plain marinara sauce lost in its search for a more compatible dish, did not help matters.

The wine, a dry, crisp white, was pleasing, about the only thing I had in this restaurant that didn't leave me feeling robbed.