When Good Restaurants Go Bad: My Montmartre Experience

Montmartre’s monsieur: Put some cheese on that mofo.

This has happened to all of us who’ve become fans of a particular restaurant: The place lets us down.

Sometimes the disappointment is (relatively) minor, like when the kitchen runs out of a favorite dish or drops the plate entirely from the menu. But then there’s the kind of disappointment that I encountered this weekend at Montmartre on Capitol Hill: During Sunday’s brunch service, the operation seemed to have shed its thick, fatty bistro skin and adopted the mantle of every other joint catering to America’s fear of calories and offal.

I know what you’re thinking: “Relax, Tim, it’s just brunch, pandering to the easiest of all restaurant-goers, those people who think four-cheese omelets are sophisticated.” I would agree with you if it were any place other than Montmartre, where I have previously enjoyed brunch plates as righteously rich as liver and coarsely ground country pâté shot through with lots of flavor-heavy fat. Yesterday’s brunch, by contrast, was a hollow imitation of a bistro lunch.

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