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Most Overrated Restaurants 2008

 

The editors of OAD compiled this list by identifying the lowest-scoring restaurants in our survey that also have what we consider to be a high rating in the Michelin or Zagat guides. Unfortunately, if you want to do a specific comparison between our results and theirs, you are going to have to do a bit of research on your own. For those of you who are new to our guide and our 120-point rating system, here is a key that explains how it works

 

Rating

OAD Recommendation

105+

Worth Planning a Trip Around

100-104

Worth Going Out of Your Way For

95-99

Important Local Choices

90-94

Recommended Restaurants

85-89

Perfectly Acceptable

Below 85

Restaurants We Can’t Recommend

 

ALL REGIONS NEW YORK CITY UNITED STATES UNITED KINGDOM EUROPE

 

 

EUROPE

 

 

1.

 

Paris, France

 

Though his restaurant has a long history of being praised by the food press, we never managed to have a good meal at Jacques Le Divellec’s restaurant. So when we saw that our panel was similarly lukewarm toward the restaurantplace, it gave us comfort (actually a refund would have been better). But when you think about it, it’s a bit puzzling—how can you screw things up so badly when you start out with ingredients of such high quality?

 

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“Another place where I’m wondering how they justify the prices for food that’s of this quality.”

“Just a shadow of what it once was.”

 

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2.

 

Vienne, France

 

Fernand Point must be turning over in his grave after reading comments from our panel like, “The only redeeming part of our visit was some Époisses and a good bottle of Château Grillet.” Indeed, we have been eyewitness to the comedy of errors that seems to plague the restaurant, having once watched a captain doing such a poor job cutting open a poulet en vessie that the liquid inside the pouch shot all over the carpet.

 

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“Stuffy service and ordinary food that often contains some type of flaw.”

“It’s a shame that such a historic restaurant can’t serve better food.”

 

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3.

 

Paris, France

 

Michel Troisgros’ cuisine acidulée doesn’t seem to have survived the TGV ride to Paris, and what comes across as “interesting and delicately balanced” in his signature restaurant in Roanne was described as “fusion cuisine at its worst” when prepared in Paris. We note that Wednesday is the only day of the week that Troisgros is actually in the kitchen, showing the depths a cuisine can plunge to when the chef isn’t always in the house.

 

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“I expected something more from the cheap version of Michel Troisgros.”

“Save your money for the original.”

 

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4.

 

San Sebastian, Spain

 

Nearly 40 percent of our panel said they couldn’t recommend this restaurant. Pedro Subijana’s menu features both modern and traditional cuisine, but the modern dishes were described as being “so ill conceived they should be aborted.” Another person complained of a wine cellar that yielded “multiple bottles of wines that had suffered heat damage,” and a “sommelier who was very resistant to replacing the wines.”

 

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“I had one of my worst meals ever at this restaurant.”

“From a depth-of-flavor, pure-pleasure perspective, this was one of the lesser meals of my San Sebastián trip.”

 

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5.

 

Paris, France

 

In all the years we have been traveling to France, we can’t recall a single instance of someone of French extraction ever telling us they ate had eaten at the restaurant. We wonder if it’s the “snooty service, stodgy and over-priced food and a wine list that has been picked over” that is keeping them away, or a “dining room that is overflowing with British and American tourists” that does the trick.

 

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“Here you can find everything that is wrong with the French dining experience.”

“Completely left behind the times.”

 

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6.

 

Crissier, Switzerland

 

Philippe Rochat hasn’t managed to capture the imagination of our panel the way his predecessor did;, with one panelist calling him “a nasty clown who is pretentious and self-satisfied,” with “recipes that are boring and cooking that is irregular.” Even those who were inclined to like Freddy Girardet’s successor took him to task, saying “It was not what I expected, with food that was ordinary and service that was slightly above average.”

 

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“Every dish was doused with a cloying and overly reduced veal demiglace.”

“The food was so heavy I felt that they were trying to force-feed me before sending me off for winter hibernation.”

 

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7.

 

Strassbourg, France

 

Sometimes restaurants and styles of cuisine hang around longer than they should, and some cite say that Emile Jung’s restaurant in Strasbourg is as a good example of this phenomenon. The room is still grand and the service still attentive (especially the charming Madame Jung), but the cuisine is “a bit tired” and “obviously not as good as it once was.” As one of our panel asked after having a meal there, “Perhaps it was great 20 years ago?”

 

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“Ate there twice, and it was two strikes and you are out. Just blah!”

“Sad indeed. Is there a particular phrase that is used to describe chefs who have lost their touch?”

 

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8.

 

Valance, France

 

Given how few women have reached the threshold of being considered world-class chefs, it pains us to see two female chefs on our list of most overrated restaurants in Europe. We wish this weren’t the case, but our panel has mixed feelings about Anne-Sophie Pic’s cuisine, with one person claiming her restaurant “is the most overrated in France,” while another said that it is “capable of being very good, but it can also be inconsistent.”

 

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“There were very high highs and very low lows in the same meal.”

“A meal that never satisfied.”

 

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9.

 

Paris, France

 

Though one of our competitors gives this restaurant its highest rating, this is yet one more highly rated Parisian restaurant that our panel showed indifference toward, with more than 50 percent of those who rated it saying it was acceptable or worse. Comments ranged from “We had the most mediocre meal I can remember” to “I had the tasting menu and only a couple of the dishes were worthy of praise.”

 

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“Over the years, the cuisine here shifted from refined versions of southwestern French cooking to something indescribable.”

“Inconsistency as well as overly stuffy service was the general thought of our table.”

 

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10.

 

Vonnas, France

 

Long a favorite among destination diners, this restaurant seems to have stumbled during the transition to the fifth generation of the Blanc family. Besides the cuisine, which was described as “living on what was were—hopefully the— memories of a very good restaurant,” the “kitsch ambiance” has been given the Disney treatment; don’t be surprised if and you feel like you’re dining at a theme park called “Georges Blanc World.”

 

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“Rather a relic, based on my two meals here. Even the famous Bresse chicken was ordinary.”

“One stunning dish, several totally unmemorable ones. I felt like I was in a factory.”