Tropica

My meal today was at Tropica Bar & Seafood Club, situated a convenient distance from work in the Metlife building, and accessible through Grand Central Station (quite the pleasant side effect when it happens to be raining, let me assure you). Though the seafood was of high quality, my opinion of the cooking is rather less positive. Indeed, for a bill of well over $100 for two, without any alcoholic drinks, I would expect much more sophistication and craft. As it is, I would avoid Tropica in the future, and counsel any readers to do the same.

The meal began with a shrimp and scallop ceviche, served in a very large cocktail glass. Indeed, too large a cocktail glass - the size of the serving had nothing to do with taste and everything to do with a desperate desire to charge $14 dollars for a starter. Furthermore, I'm unsure why the ceviche was drowned so liberally in a sauce of what tasted like tomato, lime, and cilantro - and if the sauce had to be that prodigous, why not serve something delicious to sop up the liquid? What I got instead of some interesting croutons, for example, was a piece of fried plantain. How much less useful an accompaniment would there possibly be for half a gallon of pungent sauce? Maybe they should have added a spoon with a giant hole in the bottom too.

My second course was a seared and then pan-roasted halibut on a "ragout" of potatoes and mushrooms. The halibut was properly cooked, only just converging towards flakiness, and the sauce would have been interesting but for one fault. The supposedly new potatoes had obviously, evidently, indisputably, been sitting around for more than a week. They literally dripped of starch - and while I have no objection to starchy potatoes, they had no place at all here. Who does Tropica think they're kidding, sneaking their old potatoes into a heavily flavored sauce? Do they think their lunch public has no sense of taste at all, or that they can hide their obvious faults with large glasses of ceviche? I was not impressed with this short cut. It's not that I fault them for trying to use up old potatoes- but if you're going to do that, how about some dish where other flavors mask the ingredient's inferiority? In the same situation, I perhaps would have grated the potatoes, washed them to get as much starch out as possible, and then fried them in either a potato pancake or a straw potato cake. But a preparation that literally demanded waxy salad potatoes should never have left the door of their kitchen in that condition.

Dessert, by contrast, was an entirely pleasing, if slightly bland, key lime pie topped with what seemed like a sort of large gingersnap cookie. I'd happily eat it again, though $4.00 would have been a much more sensible price for what is at best a piece of down-home baking than the required $8.50. But I guess when your clientelle consists of the expense account crowd, you can pull numbers out of a hat - it seems to work for Tropica.