Riva Mare: Dead in the Water
In our continuing quest to find Charleston’s best Italian food, Casey, Noel, Kate, and I visited Riva Mare, the heavily hyped new restaurant at the old Navy Yard. And when I say heavily hyped, I mean social media has been breathlessly assuring Charleston that this is the hottest new place in town. Based on the meal we were served, some of those people will apparently say anything for a free dinner.
Let us begin with the good. Parking was easy. The restaurant is attractive. The cocktails were creative and tasty, and both spirit-free drinks were genuinely good. Riva Mare also offers soda, tea, and nonalcoholic beer, along with the requisite tepid table water. We had ample opportunity to explore nearly the entire beverage program because it took three and a half hours to eat three courses. You heard me, three and half hours. Yes, it was painful.
Even the drinks still come with a warning sign. The frozen cocktails tasted good, but the restaurant could not manage to serve them frozen. They arrived as ordinary liquid drinks with frozen ambitions.
Our 6:30 reservation was for four people inside. The restaurant first tried to seat us outside, despite having plenty of open tables indoors. When I declined, they attempted to place us at a table set for eight, where we would have needed maritime radios to speak to one another across the vast expanse. Finally, they acted as if they were doing us a favor by seating us at a four-top inside, which was precisely what I had reserved.
We were required to place our entire order at the beginning of the meal and assured that the kitchen would course everything properly. Nearly an hour later, our appetizers arrived.
The focaccia was cooked to the edge of burned and was not worth finishing. The tuna carpaccio was acceptable, but the basil oil overwhelmed the tuna and everything else on the plate. The fritto misto of calamari, sardines, and shrimp was greasy and aggressively salty. We had to request lemon to make it edible. The octopus was rubbery, overcooked, and burned.
Long waits can be forgiven when something extraordinary eventually appears. Waiting nearly an hour for food this poorly executed merely gives everyone more time to become angry.
Our mains arrived shortly after the two-and-a-half-hour mark.
I ordered the market catch, described as snapper with littleneck clams, octopus, tomato confit, brodo, summer squash, crispy okra, and marigold. We were told that the kitchen was running out of snapper and transitioning to grouper. That was perfectly fine with me. I love grouper. The substitution was not the problem. Everything else was.
The grouper was somewhat fishy but otherwise flavorless. There were no littleneck clams and no octopus. The summer squash was essentially raw. Underneath the grouper were hunks of what appeared to be older fish, possibly remnants of the old snapper. The brodo was merely okay. The promised crispy okra consisted of three or four flakes. The marigold consisted of a few sad petals. The menu promised a composed seafood dish. The kitchen delivered a scavenger hunt looking for the promised ingredients. I barely touched it.
Casey ordered the pansotti nero with Miss Paula's shrimp, Calabrian chili, preserved lemon, olive oil, and chives. The black pasta enclosing the shrimp filling was so tough that we nearly requested a steak knife. It appeared to have been sitting under a heat lamp long enough to dry out, and there was virtually no sauce remaining. The Calabrian chili provided heat, but little else provided flavor. The entire dish tasted tired and sad.
Miss Paula would be mad that they did that to her shrimp.
Kate’s linguine vongole was barely okay. It contained far too much Calabrian chili and an astonishing amount of salt, overwhelming the clams, garlic, white wine, and parsley that should have made the dish balanced and bright.
Poor Noel may have received the most insulting main of the evening. Her trofie alla Genovese arrived cold. The underside of the plate was warm, but the plate itself, the pasta, and the sauce were cold. She sent it back, and the kitchen apparently microwaved it until it was steaming. The reheating toughened the pasta while barely softening the undercooked summer beans. It was so under-seasoned that Noel had to ask for salt and pepper simply to make it edible.
After waiting more than two and a half hours, a guest should not be seasoning microwaved pasta at the table in self-defense.
Dessert required another thirty-minute wait after we finished our mains. The coffee machine was down, so the affogato was served with cold, old espresso. The tiramisu semifreddo was okay, but it lacked the strong coffee flavor that makes tiramisu worth eating. The frozen presentation was a clever idea, but ours was frozen nearly solid. There was nothing “semi” about it.
Then, at last, came the spumoni sundae. The pistachio soft serve, amarena cherry syrup, cacao nib crumb, and toasted meringue kisses were decadent, balanced, and genuinely delicious. It was the sole dish that lived up to what I expect from this restaurant group. For one brief moment, we could see the restaurant Riva Mare might have been.
Our server, Shari, was delightful throughout this entire ordeal. She worked hard, remained gracious, reported our complaints to the manager, and did everything reasonably within her power to take care of us. We did not blame her for failures that clearly originated in the back of the house. The manager ultimately removed the worst offending dishes from our bill, which was appropriate and appreciated. I liked Shari so much that I told her to leave Riva Mare immediately and transfer to one of the group’s other restaurants, where she could learn what upscale dining is actually supposed to look like.
That brings me to why this meal left me more distraught than merely disappointed. I genuinely love and respect the restaurant group behind Riva Mare. These are the same people responsible for my beloved Brasserie La Banque. I almost hate to mention the two restaurants in the same review, lest the stank of Riva Mare’s seriously sad food somehow contaminate my most treasured French spot.
Riva Mare is shameful compared with its sister restaurants. The problems went far beyond a busy kitchen or the ordinary growing pains of a new opening. Ingredients listed on the menu were missing. Food arrived burned, greasy, salty, cold, undercooked, dried out, or seemingly reheated. Courses took an unreasonable amount of time despite our being required to order everything at once. With the exception of one excellent dessert and a strong beverage program, almost nothing justified the wait, the prices, or the considerable hype.
Charleston has too many excellent restaurants, including others operated by this very group, to spend three and a half hours eating food this bad. Based on the overwhelming evidence presented, any reasonable judge would sustain our objection to the hype. Unless something seriously changes there, Riva Mare is dead in the water.
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