Friday, October 07, 2005

Highway Robbery

My co-worker and I went to try out this new restaurant called Medicine Eat Station for lunch today. It's a new, posh/hip restaurant, located inside the Crocker Galleria in Downtown San Francisco. Their "niche" is to offer a healthy, vegetarian menu, inspired by the cooking of Zen Buddhist monks in Japan, dating back 500 years. Their motto: Food so healthy that it has historically been called by a Japanese word meaning 'medicine.' Today in Japan, this cuisine is called shojin, a word that means "working to better oneself." Bottom Line: BULLSHIT. The food is so bland and tasteless that I wonder if they even cooked or seasoned it.

I ordered one of the 5 "Foundation sets," which is their healthy, ultra-simple foundation for a meal. Again, BULLSHIT. They offered an "artisan tofu" which is nothing more than a square of uncooked tofu off a box (aka Vitasoy Tofu). Not even a peck of salt on it. Tasteless. Then I got 4 pieces of extremely small pickled turnip. Hurray. My main course was a bowl of Soba (buckwheat noodles) in a Shojin broth. Okay, instant noodle is a lot 100x better than this. The broth tasted more like hot water, and the noodles, well, very buckwheat. I feel like barfing when I ate it. I hate to diss food like this, because I was taught never to complain about food. But believe me, this is perhaps one of the worst meal I've ever had! Charge for this bland, favorless and unsavory meal: $8.95

But this is not the end of it... on the bottom of the menu itself, these words, "For convenience, a service charge of 17% is automatically added to your bill. No tipping is accepted. " BULLSHIT! Convenient for them! No, don't get me wrong, this is not your typical, add 18% for party more than 6, etc. This is 17% no matter what. It is sooo ridiculous!! The service is by no means impeccable, but we (a party of 2) were forced to pay this 17% to a waiter who didn't even fill up our glass of water or drop by to ask how we're doing. Now, this is highway robbery.

Needless to say, I will never go back there again... plus, I need to spread the word and let everyone I know how ridiculous this restaurant is. Food is horrible and overpriced. Service is poor to warrant the mandatory 17% charge. I would never recommend this restaurant to anyone, even to my worst enemy. Yes, it is THAT bad.

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