Had to revive this thread. Ate at The Pass and Provisions in Houston, which I'd definitely recommend. It's one of the few restaurants in Houston that actually manages to be creative, and the food was pretty damn good, like Michelin star quality in a city that doesn't know what Michelin stars are. Figured I'd check the Yelp reviews, and I can see why places like this don't survive.
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Spare me this ridiculousness.
Last Saturday night I agreed to go to dinner at Pass and Provisions at the behest of a friend who never has a specific restaurant request and he wanted to come here. Feeling rather charitable and vaguely intrigued to experience Gravitas' successor, I agreed to go. Well, I'm $110 poorer with very little to show for it except this review.
Pass and Provisions needs to grow up. When making the reservation 5 days in advance, I was offered 6:15 pm or 10 pm time slots because "we're so busy". I guess all of Houston is clamoring to eat weird expensive food.
Which takes me to my next, ahem, "beef". If you are a diehard carnivore who likes nothing more than sucking marrow out of cow bones or tossing back a "whole lobe of foie gras" for the low low price of $125/lobe, well, friend, here is your nirvana. On the other hand, if you gravitate to lighter fare such as the odd morsel of chicken you will be informed that "we do not serve chicken" by your self important server who most likely was a Seattle's Best barista before this gig. Should you desire a bit of fish, kindly content yourself with raw tuna accompanied by chorizo sausage and radishes and or an obscure species of fish roasted in a delicious envelope of "caul fat". Yum.
Despite the inauspicious beginning, we began our meal with a shared plate of kimchi pain au lait bread and cheese which strangely came with a small cup containing a lone raw egg yolk. No joke. I admit, however, that the bread was tasty.
For my entree, I ended up playing the least of all evils food game which systematically excludes everything I would never want to eat and resulted in me having pizza. Although I'm not crazy about downing a bunch of carbs at night, I had few appetizing options so I ordered a burrata cheese and tomato pizza. For the insane price of $24, I received a disc of plain baked dough and in a separate bowl, some roasted cherry tomatoes and a glob of mozzerella-esque cheese. Not bad but seriously? $24 for bread, cheese and tomatoes? My husband is a health conscious eater and was equally bereft of choices. Thus, he made do with soup and a salad of "raw and pickled vegetables" served with cumin. Yeah.
Our bread, raw egg, soup, salad, pizza, a couple of glasses of wine and a beer topped out at $110 pre-tip. I was disgusted. Pass and Provisions may be all the rage now but if they don't start serving food that real people want to eat, they'll soon find themselves nibbling their ghastly overpriced "Hen of the Woods served with Roasted Yeast", "Duck Confit with Pickled Raisins" and a spot of "Violet Mustard" all by their lonesome.
(All aforementioned menu items are for real. Even I could not make this stuff up.)
She gave it 2 stars, because the food scared her apparently. I guess now she can go back to Applebees with the "real people." Funnily enough though, one of my complaints during the meal was that the short rib with bone marrow didn't have any actual bone marrow, it was in a dehydrated vinaigrette on top. Then I thought for a second and realized that people in Houston wouldn't like that, and here's my proof I guess.
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Food: With four people we were able to get a wide variety of dishes, however none of us were particularly impressed. The food on its own was okay, nothing spectacular. However, taking into account the portion sizes, the price and what came in the dish, it was WAY overpriced. Some of the orders came on such large plates that they dwarfed the food presented and left us wondering where the other half was. If the portions are going to be so small, they should be served on plates more proportional to the serving size. The only item that we were more impressed by was the pizza. It was a good size, on an appropriately sized plate, and while more expensive than an average pizza, was a steal compared to the rest of the menu.
Left out the rest of this review, it wasn't relevant. Someone needs to explain to this woman the concept of negative space. The plating was fine, not the best I've seen but creative enough, and the portion of the short rib I had was huge, like too big to even finish. I'm mainly annoyed by these reviews because Houston has so few actual good restaurants, then when a good one comes along the people here are too dumb to even understand it. I'm sure this place will close in a year or so because people will be too scared of the menu to actually go, and then we'll be left with Carlos Mencia's Tex Mex.
