In the Slammer at Soleil – Los Angeles

I love it when places have themes; subtleties and not-so-subleties that give a place its purpose, and little unifying touches that tactfully tie them together, The bigger the better, the crazier the cooler, and nothing hits the spot for me like cuteness on crack. (I was in heaven in Vegas.)

I don’t require restaurants to have themes, but I can’t say I don’t smile…a lot…when my pasta plate is placed on a table featuring the Italian flag. As for Soleil, despite the distinctly French feel, this place stands as my shining example of why not all restaurants should be themed. Because Soleil had a theme and that theme was Bastille.

The first thing you lose when you go to prison is your freedom, namely your freedom of choice. You’re free to brush your teeth, but only at a time chosen by someone else. You’re free to jog around the yard, but only during the time someone else lets you go outside. At Soleil, you’re free to choose whatever entrees you want, but only if you pay the extra $1.50 to add a soup or salad because our server chose not to leave our table until we did.

My Potato and Leek Soup (du jour) tasted like it went from can to microwave to bowl. Not bad, but Campbells is cheaper and you get more in a can. The salad was a nice array of mixed greens in plain vinaigrette. As a $1.50 add-on, you get what you pay for. What we paid was for our server to leave us alone.

The Mussels special went right along with that prisoner theme, as mussels are rather unfortunate bivalves who serve a life sentence chained to a seaside rock. Just be wary of specials – it seems these mussels waited for quite a while between the ocean and my table because they weren’t the freshest I’ve had, despite the decent white wine sauce.

Unlike our server’s coercive behavior, the Canard a la Jeff was almost okay. The duck was on the dry side, and the orange sauce wasn’t enough.

To be fair, the food at Soleil, while not amazing, was likely better than what they served to anyone staying at the Bastille. So perhaps a fairer comparison would be to a rather restrictive hotel…the Hotel California, for example, where “you can check out any time you like but you can never leave”. Because that’s what happened when we tried to get the check and get out. We politely declined the dessert menu but found it pushed into our hands anyway, with the words “just take a look”. Then we were ignored by our server who walked by multiple times. We had to flag someone else down for our check.


The only real difference between Soleil and Hotel California is that we were clearly not prisoners here, of our own device. The only device we wanted was one that let us leave, and after just narrowly escaping the first time, I’m not foolish enough to attempt a second.