In my experience, Chilean sea bass is the marketing name used for toothfish, usually Patagonian toothfish. I’ve never heard it applied to cod.
I’ve also read that toothfish are extremely slow-growing, deep-dwelling cold-water fish that are frequently illegally overfished from unsustainable fisheries. The fish the OP was served might have been alive for decades before it was caught. Toothfish are not endangered yet, but they are headed that way.
I enjoy seafood, but this one is off my list.
I wasn’t meaning to suggest you were that sort of rube. I apologize if you got that impression.
My point was that if you were disappointed by the meal as presented, good bet other diners are too and the waitstaff ought to know by now which items are likely to trigger those reactions. And be able to anticipate them and talk about the dish in a diplomatic way that steers the customer towards a more successful overall experience. Whether that’s ordering an app too, or adding a side of veg, or whatever.
It’s definitely a pisser to go to a place that ought to be special for a special occasion and mostly coming away feeling mistreated.
I’m actually with you on the lack of vegetables. That is unfortunately a common issue with lots of fine dining restaurants, giving merely a suggestion of fiber instead of a reasonable amount of vegetables. It simply feels unbalanced.
It’s cool. I might have imagined I was getting a little bit of subtext from some posters along the lines of “hey, fine dining is not for everyone, and that’s okay” 
Do you know the term “mere puffery”? It’s a standard term in the law at least in the U.S. and possibly in other countries. It makes a distinction between saying nice things that can’t be verified in advertisements and making claims that are simply wrong. So it’s legal to claim that something is the best pizza around or that a car has the smoothest ride. It’s illegal to claim that a car gets more miles per gallon that it actually does or that a pizza contains ingredients it doesn’t actually have. Calling a restaurant fine dining is probably mere puffery:
Fine dining isn’t for everyone. Sadly for me, my husband doesn’t particularly enjoy fine dining. But you didn’t experience fine dining. You had a bad meal.
First, an expensive dinner shouldn’t leave you starving. If an entree isn’t enough food, the waiter should suggest you order additional items. I expect a full dinner to have at least a thousand calories. (A big Mac is about 600 calories. Add a coke and fries and it’s about 1200 calories.)
I went to an extremely fancy restaurant (the French Laundry) and was disappointed because they gave me too much to eat, and i was full before i got to the “main course”. So i didn’t enjoy it as much as i might, and i barely nibbled on the pastry platter they brought out for dessert. No one course was large, but there were 13 of them. 
I went to a fancy vegan place in NYC that didn’t really have “main courses”, but as i looked at the menu, the waiter suggested that we order three items per person, more if we had large appetites. It would have been easy to order one dish, like you usually do, and been disappointed. So they warned you not to do that! Restaurants don’t want unhappy customers. Your entree would have been fine if you’d also had an appetizer, maybe a salad, and dessert. If that’s what they expect, they should indicate that.
Second, overcooked fish and soggy risotto are inexcusable. Any competent place should be able to cook fish. Like… Maybe a cheap diner that’s too busy will overlook a dish and let it cook too long. But at “fine dining” prices they are supposed to take care of you. I’ve never made risotto, and don’t know how difficult it is to make, but “bland and mushy” sounds bad. When I’ve had it it’s always had a highly concentrated flavor – that’s kind of the appeal. (I often cook plain white rice, which is bland, and usually gets to mop up the juices of something more flavorful. I don’t call it risotto.)
So… Maybe try fine dining again, at a different restaurant. Maybe you’ll like it. Maybe it’s not for you. But you won’t know until you actually try it.
Thanks, good post. I know there is real fine dining out there, which we have experienced and thoroughly enjoyed. We just went to a resort in Mexico last February where we had some fantastic meals.
I guess what I was trying to get across in my OP and I don’t think quite expressed properly was that, I know there is truly high-end dining that will amaze, like the French Laundry you went to. But that’s a special event that you’re not going to do every weekend or even once a month, unless you’re a multimillionaire.
Then there seem to be a lot of what one might call ‘B’ tier fine dining establishments out there that seem fancy-- carry an air of pretentiousness, that you want to dress up a little for, that are not French Laundry or Michelin-star expensive but still high-priced enough that you expect to be impressed with your meal. But the meal turns out to be ordinary to mediocre. We don’t do ‘fine dining’ of this nature a lot, but over the years we have experienced our share of that type of restaurant that didn’t even live up to medium-high expectations. It doesn’t help that my cooking skills are of a level that we know what a really good meal is supposed to taste like.
A lot of what you are paying for at that level is the presentation. You sit in a nice place, you have an attentive server, you have a nice-but-not-astounding meal, and you don’t need to clean up afterwards. During the meal, you have room for conversation at the table.
Sometimes the restaurant lets you down. The server doesn’t keep your water glass full or the fish is overcooked. But that’s the contract you signed up for, and what you should expect. I haven’t done a lot of that tier of dining since covid. I was just returning to that kind of then when my husband was diagnosed with cancer, and now his low white cells make it feel not worth it. 
But it’s pleasant.
I think you get this in a lot of areas, not just fine dining, where you can put on the airs of being a high-end product without actually delivering on it. It’s just that food is so subjective that you can actually skate by for a reasonable amount of time on style and ambience alone in the food business, especially if you get some good buzz out of the gate.
Most of my disappointing food experiences are generally at exactly the type of place you describe - a recently opened, “fancy”, typically well-reviewed “fine dining” restaurant. And it’s almost always what you described - small portions of “fancy” food poorly executed, often with mediocre service.
So while I disagree that “fine dining” in general is a scam, I do suspect that there is a bit of scammery going on with restaurant reviews. I hardly ever see our local magazine or paper truly rip a new fine dining restaurant - the reviews are almost always at least somewhat positive, often downright glowing. I don’t know if it’s kickbacks or quid pro quo back-scratchery or just that readers prefer to read positive review than negative ones, but it doesn’t really help the patrons decide where to spend their money.
I have had much better luck going to places that have survived a year or more. If you can make it in the upscale dining market for a year or two it’s pretty guaranteed that the experience is at least going to be decent, if not spectacular.
The opposite can happen too, however. There are a few places that I have gone to in the first few years of their existence that were excellent only to really fall down over time. I suspect it’s because they quickly realize that while margins are high it’s often hard to actually make money in the restaurant business, so corners get cut. It’s generally a bad sign if they are still advertising awards and reviews they got 10+ years ago! Clearly they are just getting by on reputation at this point.
Very sorry about that, puzzlegal. I see from your thread about your husband’s condition that he is improving, at least as of a month or so ago. I hope that continues to be the case.
Yes, he’s doing very well, thanks. But an expected side effect of his treatment is that he has reduced blood cell counts, especially white cells, and is somewhat immune compromised.
There is, but in the U.S. it will get labeled branzino 
. Which actually I’m partial to, though the European farmed fish have some red flags related to their aquaculture practices (some American-produced branzino however is pretty sustainable).
As for “fine-dining” I’d say no, it isn’t a scam as a class. It’s just enormously variable as a class. There is a place near me that has ‘Fine Dining’ in the name (probably not a good sign to start with) that gets glowing reviews. It’s on the water in a marina, staff in uniforms, moderately (but not terribly) pricey. Utterly forgettable food. It gets glowing reviews because it is frequented by an overwhelmingly older clientele that just want a pleasant place to have lunch/dinner with their friends. It looks the part and the portion sizes are fine. But haute cuisine it is not. There are a million and one places like that and it is easy to get suckered by Yelp into trying one. Some are even local institutions - local institutions with mediocre food.
On the other hand, I have run across ‘casual fine dining’ places that are pretty decent (I won’t do truly high-end these days because at my age I’d rather gnaw off a limb than dress up with a tie or dinner jacket for a meal). I find fine dining is just too variable and expensive to do anything short of a deep dive into the restaurant before trying it.
Speaking as someone who worked on several restaurant chains as my clients in advertising, I’d concur.
“Fine Dining” (a.k.a. “white tablecloth”) restaurants are, in industry terms, the class that’s the step above “Casual Dining” restaurants (e.g., Applebee’s, Texas Roadhouse, Olive Garden, TGI Friday’s, etc.). They are usually defined as being upscale, with excellent service, and with the “experience” being an important part of what they deliver to patrons – and, obviously, with a price point that’s above casual dining places, too.
But, as you note, a restaurant which is just barely a step above Applebee’s, and a Michelin-star restaurant, are both technically “fine dining,” from an industry standpoint, even if they are not remotely similar in what they provide to their guests.
That kind of place isn’t a scam. As i said above, a lot of what you are paying for is the service and venue. If the food is perfectly okay, and the customer gets to spend an hour or two in a nice place, being served perfectly okay food, and then they can go home and not have to clean up, they are getting what they probably signed up for. Nothing wrong with that.
You’re technically correct (‘the best kind of correct’), but I do have this poorly calibrated sliding scale in my head that gets annoyed if the food is ‘just okay’ at more than just okay prices. Especially when I know other places that do it better at the same price point. The normal clientele is indeed satisfied. I’m not the normal clientele - I’m the guy who tries it once or twice and grumbles a bit about the place to friends (‘fine dining my ass’) 
. If they survive as businesses I guess good on them, but horses for courses. I won’t be back. Unless friends want to go, in which case I’ll shrug and go. It isn’t awful, just meh.
So I agree, not a scam exactly. But not for me.
That’s generally been my experience as well. Of course, the unspoken assumption is that you’re getting all the courses- appetizer, main course, and dessert. If you just get the main course, you probably won’t be very satisfied in terms of food volume.
I think that there’s a certain shift in mindset that has to happen when you get into fine dining, and there are two assumptions that go with it. The first is that you won’t go home hungry. I’ve been places where the portion sizes seemed absurd, but at the end of the night, I was pleasantly full. The second assumption/mindset shift is that you’re there for the food and the experience, and THAT is where value is gauged. Too many non-fine dining places use portion size value as a differentiator- they try and outdo each other by portion size within the same price/quality band. Fine dining shouldn’t work like that- it’s about the cheffy stuff and experience. (which is why I’d argue that steakhouses aren’t really fine dining, even if they are expensive, but that’s better left for a different thread)
It also sounds like the place you went either isn’t very good, or had a very off night. And honestly, if you’re a pretty skilled amateur cook, you can often make some dishes that are in the same league as the pros, so the best strategy there is to order stuff you can’t/won’t make at home or that you didn’t know was possible (the cheffy stuff).
As far as the “fine dining” vs. “casual dining”, maybe there needs to be a distinction between what @kenobi_65 is calling “fine dining”, which would be the “Houston’s”, “Hudson House”, “Maggiano’s Little Italy”, “Whiskey Cake”, etc… type restaurants which are upscale chains, but not the same sort of place as a Michelin-noted restaurant of any stripe.
I don’t know if it goes so far as to merit ‘rule of thumb’ status, but I’ve heard that restaurants on the water that aspire to be ‘fine dining’ often disappoint with the food quality, since they tend to fall back on the view and ambiance of being by the water. Also, being in or next to a marina gives the place a ready-made clientele willing to sacrifice some quality for convenience.
The place I wrote about in my OP is on a lake, for what that’s worth, though not near a marina.
Possibly so; as I noted, the industry itself classifies all “upscale” chains (i.e., everything above casual dining) into the “fine dining” category, but as noted, that covers a really large range of restaurants. I suspect that part of that is because, unlike casual dining, there aren’t a lot of big chains with a lot of locations* in “fine dining,” and the upper end of “fine dining” is almost entirely restaurants with only one location (or maybe a couple, at the most).
*- Ruth’s Chris has about 100 locations; Maggiano’s has about 50 locations; Seasons 52 has about 45; Capital Grille has about 75. That may seem like “a lot,” but compared to casual chains like Applebee’s (about 1,500), Olive Garden (about 950), and Texas Roadhouse (about 800), the “big” fine dining chains are relatively tiny, by comparison.
nm
(Responded to a typo that was fixed)
See ‘The Shed at Dulwich’ for details on how far you can go with buzz and the suggestion of quirky style..
If you’re not familiar, this was a completely scam restaurant/joke/demonstration by a British comedian of how easy it is to mess with online review systems.