Restaurant report

I went out to dinner the night before my birthday at JD Wesley's new place Encore which is in that Hobby Lobby strip mall on Monroe St. in Toledo where Poco Piatti used to be. We had oysters on the half shell for an appetizer as well as some duck liver pate. They were OK. The oysters were limp but after all it was August, not an oyster month. The pate was stiff. It came with crackers and bread medallions and some fruit.

For the salad course, we had a Thai chili chicken soup of which the broth part was delicious but the chicken suspiciously did not float and a roasted beet fennel salad where the fennel was nearly absent and the whole thing was overdressed and limp.

Main courses: grouper with tomatillo salsa verde that was overcooked to nearly mush and the salsa was a dime-size splotch of tartness. That came with rice and vegetable du jour as did everything on the menu. No side choices. No baked potato. Vegetable was steamed beans with carrot shards. Rice was a five-bite pile of plain blandness. We also had lobster ravioli with shrimp and scallops on the side. The overcooked scallops and shrimp were chewy. The sauce was unidentifiable but not very good. Sort of carroty.

I had high hopes for this place but it doesn't cut it. We were the only table in there so it wasn't as if the kitchen was over-taxed. As my dining companion put it, "We could have taken 10 people to Applebee's for that kind of cash and been as satisfied."

What kind of fine dining restaurant has the same side with every entree? I've had better fish at truck stops. The whole menu consisted of one pasta, four fish, two veals and three beefs.

Plus it was so dim you could hardly read the menu. Sometimes I will give a place a second chance but not this place. We voiced our dissatisfaction to our server over every course and on the way out, the restaurateur bid us farewell heartily, so I guess our comments didn't reach the kitchen.