Sunshine and Olly

Yesterday, the Brooklyn Nets, and today, some Taos restauranteurs from Brooklyn.

(I told you I mean to write about everything, and this should prove it.)

As a travel writer for APE, I reviewed restaurants as far flung as North London, New Orleans, and South Mission Beach.

Corner Office opened up in Taos late Summer 2022, in one of the two least-successful-restaurant-locations we’ve got.

Having worked in the restaurant business for years, I call them “dead spots.”

Locations that turn over, again and again, because there’s always some sucker who thinks she/he/they are smart enough to buck the trend.

(Or perhaps she/he/they didn’t do the homework to learn the history?)

In Taos, there’s a place across from the movie theater, and it’s turned over 8 times since we moved back in 2005.

(For real.)

The other Taos spot that’s clearly cursed is upstairs, in the far back corner of Taos Plaza.

It’s impossible to see from the Plaza, hard to see from the road, and therefore tricky to find, despite being in the middle of it all.

Like a little vortex that somehow rebuffs all the tourist dollars swirling by.

I absolutely recall watching Keith Van Horn play for a bad Nets team, on a sports-bar-satellite-TV there, back when the place was owned by David Leffel‘s daughter.

(So we can date that at 1998 or ’99.)

Don’t think I was there again until late October, when my wife and I joined another couple for dinner at Corner Office, as they’d been there once before.

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My new friend had recently moved from Brooklyn, and knew of the Chef/owner couple, Jori Jayne Emde and Zackary Pelaccio, as they were NYC restauranteurs, and also had succeeded in the Hudson Valley.

He’d seen their hopping spot Upstate with his own eyes.

I checked their website first, and their credentials were impeccable, as they’d worked for a list of mega-chefs, including Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, and the Batali/Bastianich group.

(It doesn’t get bigger than that, as far as resumé-street-cred in the United States.)

Fermentation classes were offered, and there was talk they were a top 40 wine restaurant as well, from Esquire Magazine.

Consider me curious, and ready to be impressed!

(Taos has a famously mediocre food scene, which is why it took Guy Fieri until 2022 to make it here for the first time. And that Dude has been EVERYWHERE.)

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Since I’m not one for foreshadowing, I’ll go ahead and tell you in the end, Jessie and I were hungry, and unimpressed.

Corner Office was a disappointment on multiple levels, and I didn’t even see the bill. (My wife took care of it, as she suspected I’d get triggered.)

The four of us sat outside, on a cold night, but there was a heat lamp, and that was nice.

We had privacy, and fresh air, so score one point for Corner Office.

The menu looked really good, with lots of small plates I could see myself eating, and mix and match options.

There was gnocchi, and burrata.

An Italian sub-theme, but also Asian and Middle Eastern influences thrown in.

We could have created a few different meals, but built it thusly:

To begin, Jessie and I shared their fancy, local carrots, in a yogurt sauce, and some roasted eggplant with peanuts.

Both came out in lumps; brown food on brown plates.

They were meager, but very tasty, I must say.

And those were the good parts.

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Now, to the problems.

While the restaurant includes a gratuity, it’s mostly self service.

Your order at a counter, and they don’t even bring you water.

When we asked for water, the modelesque, but disinterested server told us we could get it ourselves.

And where to find it.

If you want wine, you go back inside, and the owner talks to you about the wine wall.

Except he was definitely blowing smoke.

He said he ran a Top 40 Wine restaurant in NY, but Corner Office had no American wines on their list.

California is just across the desert, but Zackary told me he didn’t know enough about American product to stock it.

Say what now?

I asked about a few options, (I was trained in NYC restaurants, including Bobby Flay’s Bolo,) and was gravitating towards something from Spain, with a bit of bite, but he convinced me a bottle of Roman table wine was something special, for $40.

No surprise, it wasn’t.

And in Rome it would have cost $7!

We sat outside, at a wooden, unadorned table, eating brown food on brown plates, drinking overpriced, average wine, but at least the conversation was good.

(And the morsel appetizers were tasty, as I said.)

For the main course, Jessie and I split a Korean steak sandwich, billed as Wagyu brisket au jus, with pickled veggies, which sounded terrific.

It was $21.

To say we were dissatisfied is an understatement.

Had I been served that at a sports bar for $12, I would have been pissed off.

It was flavorless.

No acid, no flavor profile at all.

And no pickled veggies to cut the fat.

The jus was rich, but lacking depth, and there was nothing else to eat on the brown plate.

The sandwich bread was crumbly, but tasteless.

Knowing we were getting hit with a big bill, and were hungry still, Jessie and I ate every last crumb.

It was as if Oliver Twist were ready to jump out of our chests, Alien-style, and demand, “May I please have some more?”

Not because it was good, though.

Because we were still hungry!

In the end, I don’t know what the bill was.

I know it wasn’t cheap.

Because desert came from Chokola, I won’t bother to critique it. (And I don’t remember what it was anyway.)

So there’s our first restaurant review at Sunshine and Olly.

A bit of a doozy.

Corner Office was over-priced, out of touch, and not that good.

I will not be going back.

Corner Office

1.5 stars out of 4