My wife and I had Sunday lunch at Margan Restaurant, and came away with rather mixed experience. First of all, the restaurant was not ready to receive guests at the standard booking time of 11.45am, so everyone had to wait, and getting all the guests...seated was a somewhat chaotic exercise.
The food was reasonably good, but nothing that the hype surrounding this aspect of the restaurant suggested. The steamed bass grouper was exquisite, but the rest of the dishes were pedestrian at best. However, the wine pairing was the strangest experience of them all. We had many degustation lunches and dinners over the years at some of the best restaurants in the world, and the golden rule of fresh glasses for every change of wine was always religiously adhered to. However, here at Margan, we found the waitress pouring our second wine into glasses that we had used for the first wine, so we enquired later when she tried to pour the third wine into the same glasses. The explanation was that the wines were quite similar, which came as an utter surprise. Of the five wines served, why on earth would they serve three which were "similar"? Perhaps they were handicapped due to the Margan Winery not producing sufficient varieties? But in that case, surely it would not be a crime to bring in some other wine from outside. On the other hand, given that it was their own wine that was served, using already used glasses suggested that they did not even bother to pay due respect to their own products. To her credit, the waitress did replace our glasses after our query.
Of all the staff members, Pierre stood out by a country mile. His enthusiasm in sharing his knowledge of wine as well as what was available in the local area was a breath of fresh air, compared to the somewhat robotic though still efficient service of his colleagues.More