There used to be a lot of words to refer to restaurants colloquially. “Place,” for example. You’d say, “let’s go to that dinner place we walked by,” you’d go and you would be taken care of. At some point, Boston became twee enough that you couldn’t just go to a restaurant, a pub or a pizza shop – it had to be a “dining concept” too. This, according to Dr. Google, is supposed to convey that dinner is an all-encompassing experience, somewhere on the hierarchy of needs above “food” but below “self-actualization.” No matter what, you are being separated from increasing amounts of your money. This is what happened to me when I went to Café Saint-Germain.
I’ve lived in the Gwacca (Greater Wine and Cheese Cask Area) longer than this restaurant has, and here is my understanding of “dining concept”: In the morning, Café Saint-Germain sells coffee and pastries. For dinner, there is a selection of traditional French dishes (mostly different kinds of meats). This makes great business sense; the restaurant can be open all day. Just keep a couple folks (I say “folks” because I live in Somerville) out front while prepping for full dining service in the evening, with a complement of 20-something waiters and blank-faced stubbly line cooks (concept restaurants want you to see the cooks through a little window). It has that new restaurant feeling: The plants are still alive, there are neon signs, high ceilings and a polished concrete floor. It’s millennial optimism without the Zirp.
There is a transition phase between the 1369-esque coffee shop charm and a full-frontal of French food. That phase is known as lunch (I’m not sure what the restaurant industry calls it, but I’m using an approximation here), and it is when my friend and I wandered in. At Café Saint-Germain, it’s more akin to twilight. You still order at the counter, but someone brings the food to your table. I ordered an expensive sandwich and found it quite tasty.
But what happened next eclipsed everything: The waiter brought fries, which I hadn’t ordered. It used to be that in United States, when you ordered a sandwich, you got fries, maybe chips. I am old enough to remember this. Here I thought, well, I did pay something like $14, this place is glitzy enough, so I deserve fries. I was telling my friend about how good they were when – what’s this? The waiter, he’s coming back! He’s standing by our table and looking at me oddly.
“Hey man, did you order those?” he asks nervously.
“Uh, I ordered the sandwich,” I reply.
“I don’t think you ordered fries.” And he takes them from the table and throws them away.
If this is what it means to be alive, I want to die. No, yuppie scum, you will not eat the fries. You will not enjoy a side that costs the restaurant 25 cents to make. Do not pass go, and do not forget to tip at least 20 percent. What kind of “dining concept” is this? “Dinner for Schmucks” (2010)?
Lucky for him, I did not murmur a word of complaint, nor did my friend, because we are under the I-want-to-speak-to-a-manager age. We laughed about it for a good five minutes and finished our fry-free meal. Since I need to find local interest stories to tell, I sent the restaurant an email after, not mentioning any employee; just saying what happened and clarifying that I did not expect anything in return. It was just so funny that I couldn’t leave it: He took and threw away my fries! I’d understand if it was a whole wrong entree or something with allergens. But this was a modest cup of fries. Just let them go!
Unfortunately, the restaurant directed its robot servant ChatGPT to respond. The AI promised to “make it right,” though I shiver at the thought of what it planned to do, and I wonder if the restaurateurs (or are they “concept engineers” now?) even realized the robot promised reimbursement. Even more unfortunately (for them), I do not argue with robots. I write a weekly column in the paper with my human hands, and my mandate is to write about “local, local, local,” and nothing is more local than this. Next, I might start going to open houses on my street ($1.7 million sure is a lot of dollars!) and reviewing the real estate agents’ staging work.
The verdict? The food at Café Saint-Germain is good, so if you can afford it, go. It’s hard to open a restaurant, especially because running one involves ripping a lot of cigs, having constant nightmares about your beautiful ex and screaming at people like a maniac (I’ve seen “The Bear,” so I know that all restaurants are run that way). It’s hard to create a dining concept that has three phases. The only other thing I can think of that has three phases is traffic lights, and who knows how those work?
Nicholas Marchuk is a local author and engineer. His work is available at major retailers and on his website, nicholasmarchuk.com. Comments and questions can be directed to his contact form and may be responded to in this publication.
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