Miru Restaurant in Chicago: good Asian food but terrible service

Miru offers quality Japanese cuisine, even quite fine, but the service and behavior of the staff spoiled our meal.

For this last dinner in Chicago we had originally booked at The Vig. But at the last minute, Olivier, who was staying at the St Regis Chicago, offered to change to Miru, the hotel’s Japanese restaurant, where he had had lunch with his wife and where they had been delighted. Which sounds like an excellent idea…

Let’s go for Miru…

You’ll find all the articles about this vacation in the USA at the bottom of the page.

Concept

Miru est un restaurant de cuisine japonaise fusion haut de gamme.

The setting

Modern, rather sober and uncluttered, chic and very tasteful. On the other hand, there’s absolutely nothing Japanese about it.

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The restaurant has an open kitchen in front of which you can eat at the bar.

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The menu

Japanese and Japanese-inspired dishes.

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The meal

We arrive at the time of our reservation but our table isn’t ready, so we wait a good ten minutes before finally being seated.

The atmosphere in the room is noisy, with yet another American specialty: people naturally talking very loudly, music a little louder to cover the voices, and at the end people talking even louder to cover the music.

The menus are brought to us and we are asked if we would like to order water, which we do.

The problem with this type of menu is that you’re never quite sure whether it’s hearty or not. Olivier has already eaten there but at lunchtime and the evening menu is not the same (plus with his bird-like appetite I can’t trust him too much😉).

We eventually made our choice and the appetizer arrived quickly. For me, it will be the smoked pork belly skewer glazed with apple cider.

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The smell alone is enough to make you salivate: it smells deliciously of grilled pork. It will turn out to be melt-in-your-mouth, tasty, a real treat.

On the other hand, it’s eaten in 3 bites… that’s not going to fill my stomach.

As the waitress clears away, she asks me if I’d like another. I don’t much appreciate the rather aggressive and pushy way of selling extra dishes, but since it was delicious and not too hearty I’ll gladly take it.

After a reasonable wait, our main courses are brought to us.

I chose the fried rice with crispy pork, egg and garden vegetables. The dish is finished being prepared and dressed in front of us, and I was only able to photograph the final result, which is visually less appetizing…

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Olivier and his wife start their meal while I wait for cutlery to be brought in. After several unsuccessful attempts to intercept a waitress I finally succeeded and after 10 minutes I finally got my cutlery. In the meantime, my rice has cooled a little, but it’s still acceptable.

Once again, nothing to say: it’s good, tasty, almost fine…

The ballet of waiters milling around the table, ready to pounce on any dish to be cleared, is starting to get annoying, and I can feel Olivier getting quite irritated You can’t put down your cutlery to talk without someone pretending to come and take away your food.

Even though we haven’t finished our dishes, we’re repeatedly asked if we’d like coffees and desserts. We reply, politely at first, then more curtly, that we’ll see once the dishes are finished.

Between those who want to snatch our plates and those who fill our glasses with water every minute, the fun is beginning to give way to a little irritation and even tension. The conversation at the table has stopped and we exchange brief glances that all say the same thing: we can’t take it anymore, especially as it’s not easy to hear each other, and we can’t wait for it to be over.

For Olivier’s wife, it’s going to end even quicker than expected, as her unfinished plate is snatched away.

That’s enough and we ask for the bill…or at least we try to. We’ve got a specialist in clearing the table and a specialist in filling glasses of water, but it’s clear that the bill specialist isn’t available. No one responds to our glances or gestures.

5 minutes pass, then 10, then 15. I’ll go to the toilet and notice that the toilet-cleaning specialist must have been on vacation. In the restaurant of a luxury hotel, it’s a stain… literally and figuratively. I’ll spare you the photo…

No sign of a bill when I returned to the table. Time goes by and I see one starting to boil like a pressure cooker. After 30 minutes, I can’t take it anymore and I call out to someone who looks a bit more senior than the others, with gestures and insistence that don’t necessarily belong in such a property, but since it doesn’t work otherwise… And then, after all, we put ourselves at the service level.

5 minutes later the bill finally arrived. 35 minutes of waiting in all. It’s crazy, considering that everything was done to make us speed up at the end of the meal, only to leave us abandoned!

We’ll then ask you to cut the bill in half…which will fortunately be done without delay. Anecdotal, but we’ve already been faced with a situation where this seemed such an insurmountable task for the waiter that his manager had to take care of it.

I’d also like to point out that the bill was correct, i.e. without the second skewer, which I was almost forced to order and was never served.

In the end, we’ll do something we’ve never done before in a restaurant in the USA: zero tipping.

The service

What more is there to say, given that the service took up most of the diner review? Amateurism, incompetence and inappropriate attitudes. In a neighborhood pizzeria this would already be unacceptable, here it’s even less so.

That’s just one more example of the degradation of service in the USA that I’ve been seeing for a little over 10 years. The system favors over-staffed, underpaid, untrained personnel, who specialize in a single task, and end up in this kind of situation.

Service is something that needs to be learned, especially in this type of property, and this gives me the opportunity to congratulate all the restaurateurs, from bistros to Michelin-starred restaurants, that I see in France investing in the training of their apprentices. The people who took care of us would have no place in the simplest Parisian bistro, either for their skills or their attitude.

And the hotel’s subsequent excuse to Olivier is even more outrageous: the restaurant is managed by a third party and the hotel has no control over what happens there. Unacceptable: the hotel may outsource its restaurant, but it’s still the hotel’s restaurant and thus the hotel is responsible for the quality of service to its guests.

The atmosphere

For once, a restaurant that wasn’t too dark (but still a bit) but very noisy, with music that was not only loud but also completely out of keeping with the restaurant’s theme.

Bottom line

There’s nothing wrong with the food: it’s good and fine, even if the bill is a bit steep. On the other hand, the service was catastrophic from every point of view, both in terms of execution and behavior.

The articles about this vacation in the United States

#TypePost
1DiaryPlanning summer vacation 2023 in the USA
2HotelFairfield Inn by Marriott, North Conway (New-Hampshire)
3HotelAC Hotel by Marriott, Portland (Maine)
4FlightParis-Copenhaguen – SAS – SAS plus
5LoungeSAS Gold Lounge Copenhagen
6FlightCopenhagen-Gothenburg – SAS – SAS Plus
7HotelAvalon Hotel – Gothenburg
8RestaurantCarbon, Gothenburg
9LoungeSAS Lounge – Gothenburg
10FlightGothenburg-Copenhagen – SAS – SAS plus
11LoungeAmerican Airlines Admirals Club lounge, Boston Logan
12FlightBoston – Chicago O’Hare – American Airlines – Domestic First
13LoungeEventyr lounge, Copenhagen
14FlightCopenhagen-Chicago – SAS (operated par Hifly) – Business Class
15HotelThe St. Regis, Chicago
16HotelW Chicago Lakeshore
17RestaurantSignature Room at the John Hancock Center, Chicago
18RestaurantThe Purple Pig, Chicago
19RestaurantObelix, Chicago
20RestaurantCabra, Chicago
21RestaurantMiru, Chicago
22DiaryVisiting Chicago
23LoungeAmerican Airlines Flagship Lounge, Chicago O’Hare
24FlightChicago O’Hare – Indianapolis – American Airlines Domestic First
25FlightIndianapolis – Boston – American Airlines Domestic First
26LoungeSAS Lounge – Chicago O’Hare
27FlightChicago O’Hare-Stockholm – SAS – Business Class
28LoungeSAS Gold Lounge, Stockholm
29FlightStockholm-Gothenburg – SAS – SAS Plus
30HotelScandic Rubinen – Gothenburg
31RestaurantProject, Gothenburg
32FlightGothenburg-Copenhagen – SAS – SAS Plus
33FlightCopenhagen-Paris – SAS (Operated by Jet Time) – SAS Plus
34DiaryDebriefing summer vacations in the USA
Today’s itinerary
Bertrand Duperrin
Bertrand Duperrinhttp://www.duperrin.com
Compulsive traveler, present in the French #avgeek community since the late 2000s and passionate about (long) travel since his youth, Bertrand Duperrin co-founded Travel Guys with Olivier Delestre in March 2015.
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