CERALDI — Restaurant in Wellfleet

While on a business trip in NYC a few weeks ago I ran into someone from the Cape. I told her I'd be vacationing there for 8 days and asked if she had any fine dining recommendations. I'm a foodie and food critic so keep in mind that while everyone may not agree with my reviews, I do have over 25 years of dining experience around the world, 20 of those in Europe where I reported on food and wine for several magazines and online news sources. OK with that said, I was stoked to go here and experience the "experience". How novel it would be to eat at such a remote location right on the harbor. How fresh would all the ingredients be from local farms and purveyors. Right on that count! It was all fresh and locally procured. However if you come from anywhere outside this area, naming all the little towns or farms when presented with each course (there were 7 and they were not paired correctly; portions were gigantic when they should have been 1/8 the size, but I'll get to that later) is meaningless unless in context. The sweet and entertaining servers should have been guided by the chef to present the dishes with a story behind each town to make it entertaining rather than ratt;ling off town names that again, had no meaning.

Also, farm to table is a concept that Alice Waters introduced in the 1980s which then became nouvelle cuisine, traveling to France and back again. So the idea is not new.

OK the first three courses were spot on. We began with oysters from Wellfleet topped with various tastes including mock (Black river) caviar (it should have been beluga), seabean and a hot sauce. The second course was a way too big salad of lettuce with an extracted beet sauce drizzled over the salad with feta cheese and toasted walnuts. The dish could have been shared amongst 4 adults. The third and best course of all 7 was a two-colored lobster tomato bisque (red and yellow) with fresh lobster meat drizzled with a spicy oil. The lobster was divine and young.

Granted the chef did explain that the menu changes daily. That's a feat in and of itself. But did he mean everything on the menu changes daily or just one or two items? If it is everything then it seems rather inefficient. The cost of the meal is pre-set at $200 per person, not including wine or mocktail pairings. In this small restaurant the dishwasher was dead center in back of the prep table which is located in front of the U shaped bar where we sat. We should NEVER see servers cleaning dishes, taking out or putting into a dishwasher if this is supposed to be a refined dining experience. That piece of metal belongs in the kitchen! Course 4 was a crab dish with squash blossom and ricotta which was rather bland. Then came course #5 which was a way too saturated generous piece of halibut (and not cooked to perfection) with a heavy sauce of vidalia soubise, totally unnecessary for such a rich fish alongside with a nest of red, white onion shreds and radish I believe. It was okay, The chef made me another piece which was hot upon plating and crispy on the outside! Terrific. The last course before dessert of ravioli bolognese with a foamed parmagiano should have been epic. Instead it was overcooked around the way too gigantic ravioli edges and so tough as to not be able to cut. The taste was divine but unfortunately these portions were humongeous defeating the idea of "next level dining" and paired incorrectly. The bottom heavy last three courses would have served as main dishes in and of themselves but not as a 7 course tasting menu. I made the reservation a month in advance prior to my Cape vacation and alerted the kitchen I can eat no salt or sugar. But what was I served for dessert? A panna cotta with peaches and rum, dowsed of course in sugary ingredients. I think he has tremendous talent and a bright future. This could have been an off night for sure. I think with tighter management, smaller courses, and a better explanation to out of state visitors why each local purveyor is special will make all the...

Our first dining experience at Michael Ceraldi's new Provincetown restaurant was excellent! We have been fans of his for many years, and ate a number of times at his old place in Wellfleet. True to his established reputation and approach, this was food as art, and local art at that. My wife, daughter and I opted for the three course menu of salad, soup, and pasta. The salad was a beautiful combination of fresh-from-the-garden Down Home Farm lettuce and beets (both marinated and beet chips), complemented by Valley View goat cheese and pistachios, all tossed in a beautiful beet vinaigrette dressing. House baked focaccia was put to good use as a "scarpetta", sopping up all traces of the delectable dressing. Michael always has excelled with soups. The Hillside Farm corn soup was silky and delicious (you'd swear there's cream in it, but there isn't). It was bursting with fresh corn flavor and featuring a healthy drizzle of spicy chili oil, chives, and a nice chunk of diver lobster. The pasta course was a generous portion of perfectly al dente Garganelli puttanesca, and the sauce was unlike any other puttanesca sauce I've ever had. It was made from Hillside Farm tomatoes, Monopati kalamata olives (family grown and harvested in Greece, but sold locally at farm markets here on the Cape), and Longwater Farm eggplant, flavored with anchovy and dressed with a shower of freshly grated pecorino and some chopped green and slightly vinegary and spicy pepperoncini. We also opted for the "Dynamic Pairing" of a Hillside Farm watermelon lemonade (flavorful and refreshing, not too sweet), a French Sancerre rose' with beautiful strawberry and floral notes, and an earthy Veronese Italian red, "La Griola". Finally, we could not resist also ordering dessert, an out-of-this world Chequessett chocolate mousse with local Twenty Boat Rum whipped cream, a salted caramel sauce, and pistachios. (Alas, Chequessett chocolate is no more, so you won't be having that if you go.) The dinner certainly was expensive -- $98 for the three course option, $35 for the drink pairing, and $17 for the dessert -- but we left there feeling as though we had a special and unique dining experience, and had gotten our money's worth. P.S. Service was great, and the place itself is intimate, tastefully and beautifully renovated. We sat at the bar, and the view of the harbor and gradually darkening sky was phenomenal. It's definitely a splurge, but...

There were fewer good tastes left in the mouth than bad, which included banal dishes served with pretension and a sprinkle of mysticism at an overseasoned price tag. The charade began upon arrival, where we witnessed an employee waving a burning sage brush in the air to 'cleanse the energy' we were told before the arrival of the second seating of customers. The occult vibe was further enhanced by burning candles scattered everywhere and the skull of a steer as the centerpiece of the room. Even the hostess perpetuated the mystery with her evasive answers to questions on the menu. When we inquired what was on the 'Convivum' (a gratuitously arcane name, of course, for what was a trivial tasting menu), she bluntly refused to tell us. "You need to trust us." I tried to press her on it, but she declared the chef's wims to be beyond the realm of knowability and reiterated the refrain that we would just need "to trust us." And so we did, and regretted it. A three-tier platter came out with about ten little dishes for sharing. We had hoped each would be a prism into the inscrutable genius of the enigmatic chef, but the problem with the dishes is that they were too knowable, devoid of creativity or culinary craftsmanship, and at times mundane. A fresh peach with goat cheese. A bowl of melon. A bunch of oysters (which would have made me avoid the order altogether if they had disclosed it included shellfish). Bread roll sandwiches deficient of filling. Another plate of bread roll sandwiches deficient of filling (as if one wasn't enough). It felt like scraps of a kitchen that didn't have time to cook--which is probably the translation of 'Convivum'. That's not to say there weren't flashes of brilliance amidst the mediocrity--ie, locally foraged mushroom arancini with romesco, velvety corn soup with poached lobster. These seemed lifted off of the restaurant's premier "experience" (their word for the $$$ tasting menu): a 7-courses at $212 per person. In contrast, our 'Convivum' weighed in at $110 shared between two, which might seem like the bargain except for the fact that there was little to get excited by. A couple impressive small plates do not compensate for a tower of ordinary tastes. Maybe that's why they refused to disclose the contents of the dishes a priori. Or maybe they were just being pretentious. Either way, the evasiveness was tasteless like much of...