Thursday, January 5, 2012

The Bistro at Market and Grove


422 N Market St
Petersburg, VA 23803


 For the past two years my family has gone to the Bistro in downtown Petersburg for a Christmas dinner. The first year we went with my grandmother, uncle, and aunt. The food was excellent and the restaurant was beautiful but our waitress was extremely rude to my entire family. While a few of them were acting a little crazy the way she behaved was uncalled for. Somehow my father was blissfully unaware of her attitude because he was deeply engulfed by the holiday spirit.  It was so bad that Amanda wrote a letter to manager complaining about not only the bad service but the extreme rudeness of our waitress.  The called and apologized but did not offer any sort of discount or anything.
This year for some reason my dad wanted to go back for Christmas dinner, but this year on a more intimate scale. Alex was at school entertaining some young ladies so it was only my parents, Amanda, and I and don’t you know we had the same waitress. She remembered us but this time she was a lot friendlier and a lot less rude although you could tell that she had it in her. It was strange she remembered small details from I do believe two years before like us getting our picture taken next to the tree and that my dad loved the crab soup.
The restaurant for the most part was well decorated for Christmas except for a few weird pieces of art on the walls that looked like some sort of strange African mask, it may have worked somewhere else but it did not fit the setting of the Bistro. The dinner area is very small and intimate with a quaint and cozy feel to it. My dad ordered a bottle of sweet white wine that was recommended by our waitress. It was pretty good and not too expensive. I started out with the crab soup. It was very good; it had a nice seafood taste and was filled with crab meat. The last time I went to the Bistro I ordered the crab cakes which were very good with a nice and crisp outside with tender and succulent crab meat inside with almost no filler. It came with corn pudding and vegetables. The corn pudding was less sweet that I normally like but it was still quite tasty. I ordered the duck with a honey Dijon glaze and served with mashed potatoes and vegetables. The duck was awesome perfectly cooked and the glaze went extremely well with its flavor. It was sweet and savory. The mashed potatoes had bits of the skin mixed in with and were good but I wish I had switched to the corn pudding. The vegetables were cooked well but nothing special.
All in all this time my experience at the Bistro was a lot more enjoyable because our waitress was more friendly and my dad was not quite as consumed with the holiday spirit as two years before. Both the crab cakes I had the first time and the duck I had this time were good but if I went back I would get the crab cakes.  While the food was god and the prices reasonable, between $15 and $20, the Bistro is not my favorite restaurant in the Tri-Cities. Admittedly, I may still be harboring ill feelings from my first experience but I know that there are plenty of places which are just as good if not better and have a nicer staff. Unlike what everyone else says the chef never came to our table either time.  I would not tell you not to go there but I really don’t think I would recommend it unless you need to go somewhere fancier than usual, even then I may point you to a spot of two in Richmond.  

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