INYO ON NOTICE

The following review, INYO ASS, SERVERS, is by my mother, Bonita Sigmundfreud. I would like to preface her commentary by describing the last and final experience Stavros and I had at this place.

It was the Friday of my first week at my new job and I worked a little late so I drove straight from work to pick up Stavros. We agreed to go Inyo over our preferred nearby Japanese joint, Sakana, for a change of pace. Also, we discovered that our favorite place Sakana is not so favoritey if we get anyone but our friend Delgado Activito as our waiter. We hadn’t been to Inyo for a long time and I can’t remember why other than having a vague memory of being annoyed by their loud and horrible music and also that they had a Victoria’s Secret fashion show on tv the last time we were there. My Japanese urge happens about twice a month and the previous week or so—Valentine’s Day dinner, in fact—we had gone to the fancier and spookier Shiro in Novi. 

(Review-within-a-review-within-a-review—Shiro was really fun. It is a giant antebellum mansion that is purportedly haunted. It was once a grand private home and it still feels like you’re at a huge dinner party at someone’s house. After dinner we went upstairs to check out the second floor diners and came upon an unlocked, unmarked door that turned out to lead to the attic. We snuck up in the cold and dark and crept around for a while before scurrying back down and slipping out the door under the disapproving eye of a passing busboy. This is a good place to go if you want to make a big impression. Pulling into the driveway at night and being greeted by a million windows ablaze on the face of a gorgeous old mansion like that is stunning. It’s also really good and not any more expensive than your average suburban sushi joint. There’s a very cozy little bar that was probably a small maid’s bedroom or something tucked behind the staircase—it looks like a train car. It is really perfect for a date.)

Anyway, we entered Inyo the way people normally enter public places—through the front door. In keeping with these people being wrong about everything they do in relation to the concept of service, they installed the hostess station at the back door, and the bartender who greeted us as we walked in acted like we had pulled the Milton Berle of boners by hoping to get seated from the front of the restaurant. 

 

 Stavros did not like this at all. We strode to the rear, past the way-too-deep-and-tall booths and were led BACK TO THE FRONT to be seated. I had to turn sideways to squeeze past the chairs of the table next to ours, which was occupied by what looked like a rapper and his posse. They actually had a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in a bucket on the table and appeared not to be eating but rather holding a symposium on public leisure.

Once in my ultra-cramped chair, I realized it had a very pronounced wobbling problem. I did a couple of test-wobbles to make sure it wasn’t going to right itself and finally dragged myself out of it and flagged a passing busboy.

“The chair wobbles,” I said. I began rearranging my chair with the one next to it and told him that it needed to be fixed. He smiled and nodded in the way people do when they don’t exactly speak English but are in the service industry in an English-speaking country.

“My good man,” I began, prepared to deliver a lecture on the importance of even chair legs. Sensing this, he whisked himself off to another part of the restaurant and I took my new chair.

As any first week on a new job is, mine had been trying, and I was very thirsty. 

 I looked over the wine menu for a millisecond and settled on the second-cheapest Pinot Noir then began scanning the room for our server, who had yet to make him or herself known to us.

Finally the hostess slid into view, clutching the elbow of a 15-year-old boy wearing lipstick. She gave him a shove toward our table and he glided over. What followed was one of the strangest performances by a waiter I have ever experienced.

Firstly, he did not have lipstick on, it turned out, his lips were just very plump and rosy, and he pursed them together a lot and twisted them around so that they appeared on different sides of his face and curled into sneers and basically just slid all over his face like a pair of worms while he spoke. This unsettling phenomena was enhanced by his borderline leering and theatrically seductive looks; lots of eyebrow waggling and peering-through-the-lashes and knowing glances. His voice also traveled on its own meandering road, going from deep-voiced authority to girlish trilling swoon.

“And have we had a chance to look at the menu?”

“Um, actually, I’d like to get a glass of wine first, thanks.” I told him what I wanted and he almost fainted from pleasure.

“Oh, excellent choice!” he hissed in ecstasy, hugging the wine menu to his breast. “I just had that one yesterday and it is—so—delicious. Excellent, excellent!”

“Can I have the menu back…I…might want…”

“Of course, of course!” he cried, handing it back. After remembering to ask Stavros for his order, he fled, leaving us finally able to make eye contact.

“Good grief, what a screwball,” my Stavros said, looking even more like the manliest creature alive.

Within seconds the screwball with the screwy lips was back with drinks. He presented mine as if it was a diamond tiara and I was Elizabeth Taylor.

“Thank you,” said I, pouring the entire glass down my throat at once. “Very good.”

“Have we decided?” he fluttered.

I’ll save some time here and tell you that the food was mediocre and I had to send something back. Old Fluttery Eyes did not offer to bring me a replacement. Instead he looked pityingly at me when I told him I was rejecting it, as if it bespoke an irredeemable flaw within my palate that I could not enjoy waterlogged spinach.

  

Other annoyances include conversation between the lead rapper and a waitress who was opening yet another bottle of champers for him and his crew. He was temporarily alone at the table, his boyz all scattered about the bar or outside smoking, and he was obviously taking the opportunity to practice his smooth operations.

“And then you just pull out the cork like this…”

“You Japanese?”

“No, I’m actually half Korean and half American…anyway, you pull the cork…”

“You look aright for Korean. You like champagne?”

“Oh, um...hee hee…I don’t really drink..”

“Oh yeah? I bet you like champagne. S’all bubbly…taste real sweet.”

At this juncture I vomited into my handbag and we left. A few weeks later I told my parents the story and what did they do? They raced right out to Inyo.

INYO ASS, SERVERS

By Bonita Sigmundfreud

My husband and I went out to Inyo last Wednesday, March 10^th, for a drink and perhaps dinner. We got there around 5 pm. As usual at that hour, no one was behind the bar and a lone waiter sat and folded napkins at the front window. I sat at one of the window tables while my husband drove around back to find a parking place. A server came and offered me a drink and menus almost immediately, but after my husband came in, found me and sat down, we were ignored—until I looked over at the waiter folding napkins. He at once came to our table, took my husband’s order, and brought a drink.

This is typical Inyo at that hour of the day. The televisions over the bar are on, the music plays, but hardly any staff members are around. Why is there no bartender? 

Why do servers habitually gather into a small group to chat at the service area of the bar, while people are sitting and waiting at tables in the front of the place? 

It is all the more noticeable because servers are overly attentive to diners, who sit in booths at the back of the restaurant. The problem there is to get through more than three or four bites without someone asking whether everything is all right. The first time, it’s fine, even the second, but the pleasure of being looked after pales quickly afterward.

My impression is that management is not spending enough time at Inyo to know how people are performing their jobs. There is no excuse for leaving the bar unattended for longer than a restroom break during operating hours. Servers clearly realize that customers are waiting for service at the front and ignore them. Hasn’t anyone told them that drinkers frequently turn into diners? 

And that tips are calculated with service in mind?

The food is very good and well-priced. But Inyo needs to correct what is becoming a worsening lack of service. The few true professionals there need the support of their colleagues, and customers need reasons to continuing patronizing the place. 

INYO!

We had been looking forward to the opening of Inyo as much as our ill-fated anticipation of Da Nang (see “THANG LONG”). For months, the signs in the window along Woodward had been taunting us with the promise of a new Asian restaurant. I checked their website every day. Finally there appeared the option to make a reservation, so I put us down for two for last Friday.

Our reservation was for 6:45 because we had plans at 8 to go to the local comedy club. I was kinda nervous that we’d be the only people in the restaurant but I noticed a few other tables occupied by fellow early birds when we walked in. We were greeted by a tall, blonde Russian woman in a stunning black pantsuit. She showed us around so that we could get a feel for the place and choose our seating. In addition to a large bar in the front, tables are lined along the L-shaped northern half of the restaurant with a handful of very cozy, high-backed booths beyond them and a small, dark sushi bar in the rear, although it was a struggle to make note of these things because I was totally mesmerized by the swish-swish of the hostess’s pants in concert with her Slavic sussurations.

We selected a high window table along Woodward so we could keep an eye on the door. And when I say “we,” I mean I exclusively close the table for this reason. I don’t think Stavros cares where we sit as long as there is no heavy a/c blowing in his face. The table was set with red plastic chopsticks and black cloth napkins (chic!) and everything smelled new, new, new. There was the requisite techno music that every Asian restaurant in town (Ronin, Sakana) seems to favor, and two televisions above the half-circle bar, but the atmosphere was nonetheless reasonably pleasant. An abundance of wait staff stood nervously about, and a tallish fellow I presume was the owner hovered between the bar and the door all evening, making fleeting, suspicious eye contact with me, which added an element of intrigue to the evening that I found refreshing.

Our waitress was a very perky and white-toothed Katie. It seems like everyone lately has unnaturally white teeth. It’s very distracting. Anyway, Katie took our drink orders and I was pleased to note a lot of wine by the glass available. Stavros and I looked over the menu and decided to try a bunch of things and share instead of ordering entrees. Most everything on the menu was Japanese, with the exception of a few side dishes (fried rice) and I think two out of three of the poultry entrees (General Tsao’s Chicken, etc). We stuck with the flavors of Nippon for the most part. Here is what we ordered and what we thought:
• Hot and sour seafood soup—Excellent job on the “hot”; not too much white pepper. Could use some more of the “sour,” though.
• Seaweed salad—Good, standard seaweed salad, only served in a martini glass atop three thin lemon slices which made the bottom of the salad very lemony and not so good.
• Agi dashi tofu—Very, very good deep-fried tofu with bonito atop. Only complaint, was supposed to have sauce accompanying, none was provided.
• Ohitashi—Boiled spinach with bonito and dipping sauce. This was great; I have never seen this offered in Detroit and all it needed to be perf was a little soy sauce. (NOTE: We had to ask for soy sauce; none was on the table)
• Fried noodles—This was a $4 side dish that was unexpectedly great. Julienned celery and carrots with bean sprouts and scallions mixed with fried thin egg noodles. See pic here of Stavros with fried noodles and the next item on our list.

• Tempura bowl—Also great. Perfect crispness outside, no greasiness inside. Shrimp, squash, onion…I think that’s it.
• Pickled vegetable roll—Good, nothing crazy but what do you expect with such a pedestrian dish?

I am pleased to report that the ladies’ room is very well done also. In the aforementioned Ronin, I get the distinct feeling they either ran out of money or interest by the time they got to the johns. Junky, dark, and shitty stalls. Inyo may not have a cheesy make-out-on-the-sofa zone with big, open windows, I grant you, but the food’s better and it’s cheaper. It’s also a lot nicer. It’s cleaner. There’s no sleazebag element. Yet, anyway.

Items of note:
1. While I was in the can, the suspiciously spying owner man approached our table and asked Stavros how everything was. I think he waited for me to leave to talk to Stavros alone. Why? I don’t know.
2. The blonde Russian was replaced by a tall black girl in an ill-fitting sari and hideous clunky shoes. Put the blonde back.


Our bill, as you can see here…

…was not that much. You’ll note we each had two drinks, and Stavros’s beers were pints, not the 12-oz versions. I think we’ve spent that much at the Emory (although at the Emory you’d have to combine our bills to come up with a total; see “GALL AT THE EMORY” and “EMORY ON NOTICE”).

We left without dessert (tiramisu and mango something but we were stuffed and we never get dessert but I did ask what it was nonetheless) and went across the street to the comedy club, which was noteworthy only because of my terribly inappropriate attempt to join in the fun of the audience participation of improv. (Was that sentence a bit long and clumsy? Sorry.)

As anyone who has been to one of these things knows, the emcee asks the audience to provide words or scenarios for the comics to work into their acts. Well, as you can see by the bill above, I had two Chenin Blancs at Inyo. I ordered a house white at the comedy club, which turned out to be an especially vile Chardonnay, which I guzzled down quickly to get it over with. I then ordered another one to rinse the rancid taste of the first of one out of my mouth, and the second half of the show began. I should mention that the place was half-empty (optimism varies by locale and temperment; see “CAFÉ HABANA”) and that we were seated at the front table, stage right. So the emcee’s having a hard time generating much enthusiasm from either the boring crowd (a handful of women having a pathetically sedate bachelorette party and a Chinese couple and their underage son who sat in total boozeless silence the whole time) or the performers, who seemed to be going through the motions despite each having profoundly agitating personal problems. I found myself wishing we’d gotten seats in the back so we could slip out. Instead, I guzzled down approximately nine glasses of rotgut Chardonnay in preparation for the nadir of the evening, which can be described thusly: The emcee asks the audience for a three-syllable word beginning with the letter “B.” He keeps talking, apparently describing the part of speech in which this word is used, but my mind was off and running, trying to think of a three-syllable B word.

“BUCHENWALD!” I yell out.

The emcee, who’s standing on the other side of the room, the entirety of the audience between us, glares up from his notes as me and hisses, “I said ‘adjective,’” as all other persons in the room stare poison hate daggers at me.

“BUCHENWALDIAN!” I try again.

At this point, Stavros lays an okay-shut-the-fuck-up hand on my arm and I try to make myself as small, silent, and apologetically posed as possible. Obviously I did not “participate” in the show any more that night, and when it was over, fairly ran to the car. Later I justified my contributions by thinking of the great comedy clubs and comic performances of yore. What kind of stiffs are we growing around here? Reminded me of the time I had the chutzpah to stand up at an Elvis Costello show at Pine Knob and the lady next to me threatened to call security unless I took my seat.

See you at Inyo.