Mendo Bistro

User Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

It's the third time within about a year that we had dinner here. The food has been consistently good to excellent. Fish, steak, chicken, appetizers, and dessert were all very good. Service can be slow if they're very busy, but it was great today - fast and precise. I've been both with just my wife and with a large group, and it was always a great dinner in a relaxed atmosphere.

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User Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

seven of us ate there a week ago and we were disappoinnted with the menu and the food. The menu left us the choice to put a meal together with variety of sauces. I had a dry pork chop with way overcooked veggies, the zucchini must have sat in water for a very long time. We moved here in May, have tried many good restaurants here and Mendocino that we will enjoy again, but will not return to Mendo Bistro.

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User Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

The weight of popular parlance demands that no restauranteur should ever call a menu item "Mondo Mushroom" (and charge $27 a person) unless the eponymous ingredient is in such obvious abundance that customers are not left poking around for it. (And I am talking about "mondo" as to Joe Blow and not some Zen Buddhist or English/Philosopy major at Oxford.)

By this standard Mendo Bistro in Fort Bragg should have known that they fell short when a couple of customers started asking, "Where are the mushrooms?" in a scene reminiscent of the famous "Where's the beef?"crack.

Such was the case on the evening of Saturday November 10, 2007. Rain and all, we were in Fort Bragg for the Local Licks benefit with a friend who was visiting from England. We decided to sample Mendo Bistro's "Mondo Mushrooms" special, a three-course meal, in place of the wine and mushroom festival that was charging $90 a person.

Mendo Bistro is located in a spacious building with lots of windows and wonderful sunshine. Our young waitress was very friendly and the owner came across as fairly reserved but nice. He was dressed up in a suit and sat us down at our table, which meant that he wasn't doing line chef duties that evening.

The bread to start things rolling was fresh and tasty, and so was the first course of sausage and mushrooms with what appeared to be some leafy green vegetable. My friend who had skipped out on the sausage (because of her vegetarian proclivities) didn't fare so well. She found the fare, sans the sausage, a bit on the bitter side. My suggestion to replace the sausage with a vegetarian equivalent had not been eagerly received, strike one. I was a bit disappointed, even at this early stage because I could hardly find the mushrooms trumpeted in the ad we saw.

The second course which consisted of lasagna, sliced potatoes and mushrooms didn't do the menu monicker any more justice. The lasagna vibe and sauce predominated while the mushrooms took a distant back seat. The fact that the sliced potatoes turned out to be a bit under-cooked (and thus a tad crunchy) was extremely distracting. It just made the whole meal look like it had been cooked by a novice.

The mushroom creme brouillet didn't need the "mushroom" characterization attached to it for reasons already mentioned. This was altogether a disappointing dining experienced from a place that looked like it could do better. I doubt that we will give this place a second chance. But that is not to say that Mendo Bistro is a bad restaurant. It probably does well enough with its other menu items, especially judging by the steady stream of customers who came in that Saturday night. Be that as it may, the "Mondo Mushroom" idea needs some serious rethinking by the restaurant owner. If our dining experience was by a long shot indicative of the average experience at Mendo Bistro, then the owner really needs to think long and hard at what he is offering, lest some more fastidious competition moves in and cleans his plates. Famed "hip" doesn't cut it when the food is less than average.

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