Dinner c/o Novi

After dim sum I returned to the office and worked for the rest of the day. Once that was behind me, my parents came by and we tried to decide where to eat in the neighborhood. I was curious about Novi, the restaurant that took over the short lived Tied House. This is not going to be an overly positive review, though this has far more to do with the service than the food. It was a Sunday and we were one of probably four or five tables, so not really packed or busy. We were seated in a nice enough booth near the hostess stand. Our waitress gave us our menus and left us to make our choices. What was strange was that we saw a lady walk out of the restaurant with a pizza box, but there wasn't any pizza on the menu. Turns out they had a separate pizza menu, which we were not given because our waitress, though acting as hostess, 'wasn't a hostess,' so she had completely forgotten to give us the additional information. Whatever. What's the point of going through each small infraction in detail? The menu is stereotypical mid-tier restaurant food, sandwiches and salads and pasta dishes etc. I ordered the French onion soup, it was a little salty but, come on, you can't really mess up gooey cheese. My father liked the look of the seafood pescatore, especially because of the clams...and asked for no scallops because he knew they wouldn't compare to the scallop from Le Bec Fin. My mother had the soup of the day, and asparagus soup with more subtlety than I would have expected, and ordered a side salad with blue cheese dressing.
I ordered a cobb salad, which was huge. The chicken was nicely grilled, the bacon was plentiful, it was a good salad. Problem was that there were no clams in my dad's dish and my mother's salad didn't have the right dressing, and our waitress had disappeared. We flagged down the manager type, who was quite apologetic and went back to the kitchen to sort it all out. Seems that the waitress, in addition to forgetting to give us the pizza menu, also forgot to inform us that the kitchen was out of clams. I'm under the impression that my father would have had a different meal had he known this. The salad was quickly brought out with the proper dressing.
So, basically what I'm saying is that the food was middle of the road fine. Nothing really inspired or brilliant, but not terrible or entirely forgettable. And I should say that the manager was very contrite and offered us free limoncellos at the end of our meal, which we took, but damn was this particular waitress rather bad at her job. Of course this was only 24 hours after Le Bec Fin, so maybe my standards were on high alert...but, really, I think this girl needed a little additional training. Telling your customer that the reason you didn't do something was because it's not really your job is not something you do. Not doing multiple things that any competent server would do (re: remembering to tell your customers what is and is not available) is also a pretty basic tenet by which most successful restaurant workers live. I am sounding like an asshole. Thing was she was perfectly friendly, just ditzy.

So when I first saw them on Saturday, it took me a minute to realize that my father had a pony tail. I know, right? I made fun of him a bit, but, in the end, he deserves to do whatever he wants with his hair, having missed his chance at hippie-dom back in the day.
When not in a pony tail, I didn't mind the length quite so much. I thought it was very grizzly adams meets some dude from the late 1800s.