PT | Restaurant review
The placeholder restaurant in the Talbott Hotel is just that.
PT isn’t meant to last forever. It’s a pop-up restaurant, with food from Mercadito chef Patricio Sandoval and drinks from the Tippling Bros., and it’s intended to serve as a placeholder until Mercadito Hospitality finishes conceptualizing and remodeling this space (formerly a couple iterations of Bice) into a TBD restaurant, to open this fall.
What this means is PT has incredibly low stakes. As long as the Mercadito group can provide edible food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the Talbott Hotel’s needs will be met. So it struck me as fun that Sandoval and crew seemed to be thinking of this as an opportunity, creating and marketing this temporary restaurant with a menu whose breeziness (sandwiches, seafood) seems well-suited to its summer-only timeline.
Yet something tells me the fleeting nature of this enterprise also kept the kitchen from sufficiently investing—both creatively and financially—in the project. I like the way corn and red potatoes give striped-bass ceviche the tone of a crawfish boil, but I don’t get why the bowl full of excess liquid wasn’t drained. Ancho chili–marinated shrimp à la diabla is damn spicy, but I found it more than a little odd that nowhere on the menu does it mention that the four shrimp come over a huge bowl of pasta. (Bice overstock?) Then there are phoned-in hotel foods like a chopped salad with sad tomatoes and a burned apple turnover (the one dessert).
A pop-up is a restaurant you rush to get to before it ends. Dishes like these suggest PT is just a waiting game.
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