Chouquet’s – Such a Waste of Life

Restaurant: Chouquet’s
Address: 2500 Washington Ave at Fillmore, Pacific Heights, SF
Phone Number: (415) 359-0075
Cuisine: French
Date Last Visited: January 16, 2009
Dining Partners: Ate Di and Ate Di’s Dad (aka Uncle)

I’m so irritated still while I am writing this. Ate Di and I planned to have lunch on Friday, January 16 because we hadn’t seen in each other in such a long time. A while back, my coworkers and I walked past Chouquet’s, which is two blocks from my building. The menu looked cool and the al fresco dining would be awesome in a sunny day. Fast forward to this visit – it is the second day of Dine About Town and luckily for us, Chouquet’s is on the restaurant list.

I made a reservation on OpenTable for the three of us at 1 p.m. It’s literally less than a 5-minute walk from my office and the sun was shining and it really was a great day to eat lunch with them. As I walked in the door, I realized that I forgot my camera. GAH! I hate that. It was okay though because I had my camera phone.

12:50-ish: I say we have a reservation and we were seated and given the menus immediately. Tell me why it took a while to get a server’s attention when we were ready to order. We finally get the waitress’s attention and I opt for the Dine About Town menu for $21.95:

1st course: Butter lettuce salad with balsamic vinaigrette
2nd course: Niman Ranch Burger and Pommes Frites
3rd course: Floating Island

I don't know what a Floating Island was, but it sounded interesting.

1:09 p.m.: We received some bread and butter. I like French bread a lot, so this was good. I would have liked it warmed, but that’s okay. The butter was nice and soft to spread. Good.

1:14 p.m: After the bread we get our first course:


This is not a “salad”! It’s a head of lettuce with vinaigrette poured on it. Did someone call in sick today and no one was able to cut and toss the lettuce for us? The lettuce was okay. The dressing was okay. There were no other accoutrements on, in, under the head of lettuce. None of us was not impressed at all.

Oh yes, we finally get our waters in the MIDDLE of the first course. WOW.

Okay, I let the so-called lettuce slide because maybe the burger would be good. I watched 5 or so burgers come to the window and I was hoping that maybe they would be our’s. Uncle and I ordered a burger each and Ate Di ordered the Ahi Tuna. Alas, we would have to wait…and wait…and wait..

After watching people who came AFTER us get their orders, I began to get angry. For real, does it really take THAT long to get a burger? I understand that it was kind of busy, but you don’t make people wait that long. I finally make a call to my coworker at 1:45 p.m. that I would be back to the office.

30 minutes waiting for our burgers after getting the first course. RIDICULOUS. No wait! We waited over 30 minutes for the burgers and they still didn’t come out!

Or am I just wrong?

Would you wait over half an hour for a burger?

Uncle asked for the check for what we had consumed and the receipt looked like this:


They charged us $8 for those pathetic heads of lettuce with boring dressing. Are you f*cking kidding me? I have never been this angry with a restaurant before. I was sad that Uncle got so angry and had to pay for food that wasn’t even that good! Oh yeah, the time on the receipt is so wrong. Maybe they rigged the time so that you don’t think that so much time had past. Trust me, the times I have are correct because the pictures I took and the phone calls I made all have timestamps.

So during our “meal,” I figured that if we got one course per hour, that we would have been done at 4 p.m. The French Laundry has 3-4 hour meals…but they have like 15 courses!!

I would have just walked out for real. Chouquet’s is lucky that we even paid. Such a waste of time. Such a waste of LIFE. Should have gone to Fresca. At least they’re reliable.

Chouquet’s – doesn’t matter if a restaurant is in a rich neighborhood, they can still suck @$$.

Slow service. Unimpressive food. NEVER AGAIN!

P.S. Isn’t it sad when you tell someone your favorite part of the meal was the bread and butter? SAD.