Japanese Restaurant Reviews
Vintage Restaurant
Woonstocket RI
Woonsocket is a central meeting point for me and a friend of mine. When we found the Vintage restaurant in this city, with Italian food for her and sushi for me, it seemed like the perfect pairing of interests. Even better, they have live jazz on Thursday nights! So we made reservations for a Thursday at 6pm.
Parking here is odd. There's a lot right behind the restaurant building, but it is NOT for the restaurant. You want to park in the center of the rotary, which is across from the restaurant. Parking is free! So as long as you know to do that, you're all set. Here is a photo of the restaurant, taking from that parking area.
When you walk in the door, a nice bar / lounge area is to the right, while the dining area is to the left. Upstairs is the jazz club area. The man waiting to greet me was *wonderful*. Friendly, helpful, cheerful. He brought me to the first table in the dining area, by a lovely window, right where I could watch the door. In the photo, the windows to the right are for the lounge, the windows to the left are the dining area. I was at that fifth window from the left hand side, the one right by the entry door.
In only a few minutes my friend showed up and we settled in. We were served water, and our waiter said we could take our time with the menus. Then he was off.
We looked through the menus, made our choices and then closed the menus and put them down. We talked a while. We were right at the entryway to the dining room, so the waiter and another waiter went back and forth past us constantly, serving the other tables. Fifteen minutes went by. We regularly made eye contact with our waiter as he came into the room laden with food. He was of course busy in that direction. When he was leaving the room he ALWAYS looked away from us! Every single time!
Half an hour went by. We were happy talking, so it's not like we were sitting in stony-faced silence, but still, we would have liked something to drink by now. We started trying to call out to him as he went past. This isn't a "giant" dining room by any stretch of the imagination. he was passing within five feet of our table. And yet he ignored us time after time. If we caught his eye, he smiled as if we were flirting with him or something. And he kept going.
Finally, literally an hour after we had arrived, we finally had to reach out and grab him and say loudly that we were ready to order. I eat out fairly often and this was the longest I'd ever had to wait, in terms of getting even drinks or appetizers to start out with.
So my friend ordered peking ravioli and a pineapple pizza. He nodded without writing them down. I said I wanted sashimi and started listing off tuna, yellowtail ... he had me hold up and grabbed his notebook. He wrote down my friend's orders, then turned to me. I pointed at the menu, in the "sashimi" column, and said that I wanted tuna, yellowtail, and salmon sashimi. I showed him where they were. He agreed. I also wanted a seaweed salad and a Hawaiian roll. I asked him if they had sake, and he said yes. I found the wine list, which did have three sakes listed, and chose one. My friend said she wanted a glass of chianti. He wrote that down and turned to me and asked if I'd like something to drink. I said that I would like my sake. He chuckled and agreed. Off he went.
I should have taken photos of the wine glasses. The chianti glass was normal, even large sized and lasted my friend through the night. My sake glass on the other hand was TINY. It is almost not an exaggeration to say it was a thin quarter-sized flute. Still, on to the meal.
Peking ravioli - good.
Seaweed salad - good.
Pineapple pizza - good.
Now, does this look like sashimi to you? I guess if you're new to the world of sushi, you might know the difference. This is SUSHI with rice. I wanted SASHIMI which has no rice and you get more pieces of fish. But by now I was starving and didn't want to deal with it. So I peeled the fish off the rice and just ate the fish.
Now ironically the WAITER never said a word about this. But the *GREETER* came right over and asked if something was wrong, and I explained that I'd ordered sashimi and was served sushi. He said I should bring it up to the waiter. Then he went back to his station.
On to dessert. I got molten cake and port. The cake was lovely, but again the port came in a glass the size of a thimble.
I was very disappointed by the sake and port serving sizes, and by our waiter (who to the end completely ignored the piles of rice I left on my plate). He did bring the bill fairly promptly.
I would go back again, if we got a different waiter, and knowing I'm going to have to double up on my alcohol orders (which I'm sure is their purpose).
Visit #2
As mentioned, my friend and I did return to Vintage about a year later to meet up again. Normally when I call in somewhere for reservations I don't give my full name. I don't really expect that restaurants in the area know about my reviews, but I want my reviews to be completely ethical so just in case I try to keep a low profile. Here I called in and made the reservations under the name "Shea". "Oh, Lisa Shea?" asked the person on the phone. I admitted that I was (it's one thing to be low key, it's another to lie). He said that that was great and they'd love to have me back again. He wrote us down for 2 people at 6pm. He asked if I wanted upstairs or downstairs, and I said downstairs was good. I found it exceedingly odd that they'd have me on some sort of a list after just one visit!
I got there right on time and went in. I stated that I had reservations. The woman looked me up and thought I had reservations for 5 people. I said no, just two. I said my friend wasn't here yet and asked if they could please bring her along when she got there. They said sure! They decided to seat me upstairs, which was fine. I got to see something different.
I thought I saw my friend come in about 10 minutes later, but nobody came up. Another five minutes passed. I went downstairs and looked around, but didn't see her. Finally I called her - and she had been seated downstairs, tucked into a nook! How did the restaurant, knowing both of us were waiting for a woman, then seat us apart and not even mention it to the other person?
She ordered peking ravioli with a pizza, and I went for my sushi. I ordered sake with my sushi - and while I knew it had been a small glass last time, I was really surprised to see that now it was served *one tiny sake glass at a time*. A thimbleful at a time. This was bordering on silly.
Also, there were literally only four types of sushi on the menu now - tuna, yellowtail, salmon, and eel. If I'd wanted any other sushi types, I was out of luck! So I did order some tuna, yellowtail, and salmon, both as sashimi and in a roll.
The waiter gets kudos for noticing that I was a little disappointed with the teeny tiny sake cups and he offered to give me one for free. I thanked him but paid for it of course. It wasn't his fault that the restaurant served such tiny sake servings.
The sushi rolls were on the large size, making them unwieldy to eat. They would collapse in your hand. While my roll was collapsing, my friend's pizza was also losing pieces on her plate. So that didn't count in their favor.
Really, though, a main reason we came here was because it offered sushi along with other things so we had both options available. If all they have is four types of sushi now, with the tiniest sake glasses on the planet, there just isn't much draw to return. The pizza was certainly OK, but it wasn't enough of a draw to come back. So I think two visits is enough for us here.
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