Perry’s – Dallas, TX
Well, one of my favorites messed it up this time. I have enjoyed Perry´s steaks for several years, and I hope this recent restaurant week experience is not indicative of what future guests can expect. I suspect most of the issues we experienced on this visit were due to a woefully understaffed wait staff serving a completely full dining room.
We were seated at just past 9PM for an 8:30 reservation, and ended up in a not very desireable table, the only one they had. No waiter showed up for a while, and when he did, he brought the wrong menus. A further wait produced the correct menus.
The cesar salads were nothing to write home about—fresh but under-dressed and thus a little dry. My dining companion ordered a seared tuna and someone along the way decided to serve her the same sirloin steak I had ordered. After the food was bussed out, we could not find our waiter to send the mistaken entree back. We got someone else’s attention and they called our waiter, who quickly took it back and produced the correct tuna. But unfortunately, it was too quickly, and the tuna was barely even colored on the sides—it had barely touched the pan and was refrigerator cold in the middle. Sending that one back produced a condescending explanation of how tuna was supposed to be eaten medium rare (we had, in fact ordered it rare). We deemed it raw, not rare, and asked for them to put it on the pan for a minute more each side, which they did. After all the drama about the tuna, the saddest part is I must report it wasnt very good—just average an with so much soy sauce in the mix that it obscured the other flavors. On a positive note, the aforementioned steak was well prepared, and delicious as usual.
Chocolate cake for dessert was rich and satisfying, and a mid-range Penfold’s Shiraz was ok, but hardly a great value. The waiter was never rude, but he was clearly over-worked and trying a little to hard too compensate for it with artificial smiles and ingenuine politeness. It did not help that he answered every request with the phrase “not a problem”, but that may just be a style issue.
I will go back to Perry’s based on previous experiences, but I struggled to get to a “recommend” rating based on this visit. Lucky the chocolate cake was good, because otherwise I may have downgraded this previously super-consistent spot.
Recommended
