At the bottom of a lovely overpriced Marriot hotel is the hip, modern and swanky restaurant/ bar/ patio lounge known as Arterra, with a fresh sushi bar and tight shirted waitresses and live music and hip low furniture and dark wood and all male bartenders and pretty much the entire list of everything you should look for in a night-time hot spot.  Enjoying a comfy seat outdoors by a lovely fire spouting out of a pile of jagged cut glass, we surveyed the menu and drink offerings for some time before finally managing to get a server, who then pretty much ignored us from then on.  After moving to the inside which was cozy and full, we commandeered a table after again getting left to our own devices. 

We started off with some edgy sounding drinks with traditional California flair, meaning they came with various vegetables and plants floating in them.  Tasty and not at all skimpy on the alcohol.  We followed with an order of fried calamari, Kobe beef sliders, and since this particular restaurant had been fused with a sushi bar and Japanese chef for extra authenticity, we also ordered a rainbow roll.

While the food was tasty and of course served on modern and unnecessarily huge plates, there were a couple of obvious food faux pas.  The sliders were small and the sushi was huge.  It was a bit difficult to eat either.  The calamari was fine, but at $13, it better be.  My second cocktail came in a metal bucket, making me feel less like a trendy diner and more like a grog-swilling Viking. But all in all, strong drinks, plenty of meat and a variety of fare.

So when I left, why was I left feeling like something was missing?  Could it have been because my wallet was about $150 lighter? Maybe.  Could it have been that just about everything I had consumed was 90% sugar and I was suffering a bad carb trip?  Possibly.  Or it could have been that despite the extensive menu and full-on sushi bar and semi-attentive waitresses and 40 different kinds of modern martinis, what was missing was substance.  Purpose.  Depth.  A certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ that makes a great restaurant.

For we, as Americans, seek that feeling. It’s deep down in everything we do.  It’s what drives us.  It’s why we go to typically three different restaurants and bars every week.  Like how we all buy exactly the same phone but put on a different cover.  We fight for a feeling of originality.  It’s why we all buy our coffee at the same lemming style coffee shop but all order a different cup of Joe.  It’s what makes us decide to take out a loan on our house and sign a lease and build something and sell something and work hard every day to make something happen.

When you buy that thing you buy that originality and unique personality that makes it worth your hard earned dough.  This is not that thing.  This is the candy coated, vacuum packed hermetically sealed ‘I wish my restaurant had a soul’ attempt at being a real hot blooded American entrepreneur.   The kind that stays up nights balancing budgets and making new drink recipes and trying to figure out how to do things a bit better.  This is the half-assed, thinking like a millennial way to make money.

It’s an overshot assault of every hip thing all at once put together by analysts and survey takers assuring the board of directors that if you put elder flower liqueur in a martini right now people will buy it.  That churros with chocolate dipping sauce are the haute cuisine dessert of the moment.  The problem isn’t that it’s bad.  The problem is that it’s not trying.  It’s not new.  Its not growth.  We already know that its fine, it’ll sell. But does it push the borders of what could be awesome?  No it does not. Maybe another 2 million dollar renovation and redesign by marketing teams to repackage the same junk over and over again will help.  Been there.  Eaten that. What’s for lunch?