Avoid Beige! Take your yen elsewhere.

Mr. Megatop and I dined at Beige on Boxing Day 2007. It was meant to be our very special Christmas-New Year's dinner, as we often wind up having low-key evenings on the actual days of Christmas and New Year's Eve. The company was the best part, though Beige had nothing to do with that, of course. The setting was the second-best part, and it saved the evening. As requested, we were given a table by the window, which afforded a spectacular view of Chuo-Dori and the Ginza nightscape. The restaurant itself, in a word, sucked.

Service was painfully slow. It took quite some time for anyone to acknowledge us after we were seated. No one put our napkins down for us, much less did they offer black napkins to avoid lint on our dark suits. As many high-end restaurants are wont to do, they presented the wine list and cocktail menu and expected us to make a choice before seeing what's on the dinner menu. Well, asking for the dinner menu seemed to be a real inconvenience, and it took quite a while yet to appear. When we had finally sorted out what we were going to order, subject to a question or two, it took some more effort to get the waiter to appear again and take our order. They could not subsitute something from the a la carte menu onto the three-or-four-course menu, so Mr. Megatop had to order an 8900-yen pork dish on top of his 18,000-yen three-course menu in order to have four courses along with me (he doesn't eat beef and the other two options on the four-courser, both fish, don't go with Bordeaux). The excuse was that they couldn't downsize the pork dish to go with the four-course option, a notion that seemed plausible until we saw the pork dish as-served. Another mild annoyance. So was the menu itself, actually, which inexplicably wandered between French and English from one word to the next.

The wine list was actually more impressive in person than on the website. It had evidently been updated or expanded, and it was simply incredible. So was the sommelier, though not in a good way. Asked to make a recommendation between 1985 Ch. Cos d'Estournel and 1985 Ch. Leoville Las Cases, all he could do was point and nod at the Las Cases. He could not provided any explanation as to why he would recommend one over the other, and really couldn't say anything at all, at least in English. (Even allowing that we were not in an English-speaking country, and that the restaurant is ostensibly French, the fellow can fairly be expected to have something to say-- something! Anything!) I went with the Las Cases. My annoyance increased, as it took FOREVER for him to open the bloody bottle, as he let it sit unopened on the sommelier's cart for nearly 15 minutes despite my (needlessly, I would have thought) asking that it be opened promptly so it could breathe. When he finally got round to opening it, he used the sommelier's candle for light rather than under the neck of the bottle, and he opened it at least 30 feet away from me, so I couldn't really see much of what he was doing. He presented the taste without presenting the cork (very bad form), and when he finally gave me the cork after I specifically asked, I realized why: he had broken it. The wine was fine--i.e., not corked--but not terribly impressive. Maybe I should have stuck with my instincts and gone for the Cos.

The food was completely unremarkable. The cheeses in the cheese course were presented in the "wrong" order with accompaniments that clashed more than anything. Other service lapses included: we had to ask for water (after being seated for more than an hour with nothing on our table save for the menus), food was served to the wrong person, a waiter's stand was left empty on the floor nearby our table for 10 or 15 minutes, and the "expediting" waitress who served one of our courses couldn't tell us anything about it.

Dessert was a rare good point.

For nearly $500 per person (including the wine, service, tax), it was not worth the money, not even close. The meal we had at a steakhouse in Osaka a few days earlier, for a fraction of the price, was much much much better. In fact, so was the wine. For the record, the steakhouse was called "Ron," and the wine was a 2003 Spottswoode (which I had brought with us from home). Yes, an '03 Spottswoode was better than an '85 Las Cases.