Negative nancy

I'd like to preface my restaurant review by saying that there are many, many restaurants in Sac that I think are excellent. A few restaurants on this list are: the Waterboy, Bravo, 524, Nishiki, Amarin, Maaloufs, Famous Kabob, Bernardo, Zelda's, Romas, and the list could go on. So it's not like I hate everything. It just seems that most new places I try are crappy. Or as Rush Limbaugh would say "style over substance". So with that intro, let's move on to my review of....BLACK PEARL OYSTER BAR on J st.

OK, so first off, I didn't get any oysters. Maybe that makes this review unfair. The only raw oysters I have had are small ones in oyster shooters and while I plan to try them at some point, I haven't yet. When my sister and I walked in (or I should say stumbled in, because the place is so dark) we peered into the gloom and first thing I thought was, "I'm underdressed". Everyone was pretty business casual "fancy" and there seemed to be a few "girls night out" hotty groups. So I'm already at a mental disadvantage and then Song and I stand there awkwardly for a few minutes trying to gauge whether we should seat ourselves. There didn't appear to be a hostess, but because it is a somewhat pricey sit-down restaurant it didn't seem right to just sit down. We waited and waited, and finally decided to try to sit upstairs and someone was bound to notice us. As we headed upstairs, a group of hotties headed up there with drinks told us that the upstairs seating area was closed, so we turned around and filed past them. We grabbed a table and sat there. Nothing. After 10 minutes or so we started to debate other places we could eat, but I could tell my sister wanted to stay. Finally, out of the darkness the waiter appeared. Well, he was actually the bartender, so throughout the course of the meal he was simultaneously waiting on us and working the bar by himself. There were three mysterious blondes who "worked" there but I could not tell what their job was, because the bartender appeared to be doing everything. One of the ladies had a scary sort of Fergie from Black-eyed Peas look (possibly the worst look ever) and she clearly had collagen-injected lips and probably some other work, too. My sister related a story in which she was trying to get a drink there one night and one of the other blondes was a complete bitch to her for no reason.

Anyway, on to the food. We decided to split some appetizers. We got: clam chowder, crab spring rolls, some scallop thing and ahi tartare. The waiter/bartender brought us bread, which was excellent. He also kept calling us "girls" which really bugged me because he was clearly younger than me. The clam chowder was really, really good. During the winter I will probably go back and just order that, and with the really good bread it would be an excellent meal. The rest of the appetizers soon arrived. Boy, the chef there really likes watercress. Everything was either garnished by it, or contained it, or both. I like watercress, too, but this presentation got a bit monotonous. Everything was presented very artfully, stacked and with fancy sauces squiggled on the plate. The spring rolls were terrible. We didn't eat them. They were unucessarily huge, but 90% of the stuffing was unflavored jelly noodles. There was a bit of tasteless crab (I even tried picking some out and eating it and it still had no discernible flavor), an assload of jelly noodles and the aforementioned watercress. No mint, no cilantro, nada. The dipping sauce was cloyingly sweet. The scallops were seared, stacked on a hockey puck of rice, and the outer perimeter of rice was wrapped with grilled eggplant. It took us a minute to figure out it was eggplant because it was too dark for us to see what it was. The whole thing was on a lake of weird white sauce with bits of fresh ginger in it. The scallops had an OK flavor, but the rice was waaaaay overcooked and gummy. The eggplant combo was just weird and not good. The tuna tartare was passable if you kind of scraped of the salsa and just dipped it in a wasabi squiggle, but it was twelve bucks and far inferior to any sashimi at Nishiki, so I wouldn't order it again. We waited around forever for the bill and I joked that maybe the waiter had left it and we just couldn't see it on the table.