A number of friends around DC had told me that I ought to visit a specific restaurant in Vienna, Virginia - it had a good, inexpensive, French country lunch menu, they said. So I went, and was completely taken aback when the first course salad arrived - a few leaves of iceberg lettuce, topped with a couple of grated carrots and what seemed an awful lot like a sauce that had once seen the inside of a bottle.

There's plainly no sense in which my reaction to this salad was simply a matter of taste. Iceberg lettuce in a restaurant pretending to French country cuisine is objectively wrong, whatever someone like the often confused James Beard might have had to say. Nonetheless, my instinct in the restaurant was to say nothing. If they can't be bothered to notice that they just served an actual customer iceberg lettuce with insipid dressing, to me it makes no sense to help them realize their mistake

My dining companion, on the other hand, was pretty irate - they're taking their customers for idiots, she said. You can't let them just hand out iceberg lettuce salads with no consequences. You and I know this is wrong - we should take them to task. And, she added, we should specifically take them to task the more expensive the restaurant gets. Sure, maybe you can let them escape at $14.95 for three courses as here, but cowards like you say nothing even when a $40 plate is objectively wrong. Why?

In the end, I did nothing, and the meal somewhat redeemed itself with a passable duck confit, though the accompanying potatoes had obviously been hanging around since the night before, and the dried plantain adorning the creme caramele (after I had ordered creme brulee anyway) ill placed. But I'm left wondering whether my approach is wrong. My sense is that if they want my advice, they're welcome to pay me, or suffer when an actual critic shows up and is served the same desultory nonsense. But maybe, and especially since this restaurant has survived unscathed for a while, people should speak out during dinner. I wonder - please email me with your opinions.