Bad Baba Ghanouj at Shish

A few months ago, I procured some of those discounted gift certificates from restaurant.com (they sell $25 gift cards for $2 all the time; totally worth checking out). When we were looking for something to do on Thursday night, Laura Fitzscenic and stand-in Scenic Dayna wound up cashing one in at Shish Ultra Lounge in West Hartford. Ultra!

Now, we only knew two pieces of information about Shish before entering; that its some kind of jammin night club on the weekends where this kind of thing goes on:












and, that they have a dress code.

Tailored Casual Attire Only
Dress or Designer Footwear
No Sport Style Head wear

(We left our visors in the car.)

First of all, this place looks cool. There are two rooms, with lots of leather sectionals and other comfy seating, interesting looking light fixtures, a large dance floor (are you imagining this ok? Because we totally slacked on taking pictures.); they did a great job of making an inviting space where you would totally want to have a sick party. Guerrilla Queer Bar, anyone?

Our waiter brought over the list of "signature" cocktails, and proudly claimed that they had all been "invented by people who work at Shish and could not be found anywhere else". Um, we find it a little hard to believe that they can take credit for the combination of dark rum and ginger beer, aka Dark and Stormy, aka Dark and Scenic. We decided to not point this out and just go with a Cucumber Martini (good) and a Miami Vice (too sweet).

The food menu was small and generally uninteresting, so we decided to just go with some hummus and baba ghanouj. We enjoyed the lemony hummus, but the baba ghanouj? It had a familiar flavor that I just couldn't place, but Dayna was able to identify it immediately:
















We sent it back immediately and ordered a small pizza as a replacement. Imagine our surprise when we received the bill and noticed the $9.00 charge for the uneaten baba ghanouj. We could have bought some actual cigarettes with that money! When we questioned our waiter, he explained that the owner generally doesn't allow charges to be removed from the bill for any reason. What? Not that we have a habit of sending food back in restaurants, but sometimes it has to happen, and this policy is totally out of bounds.

With some persistence, we got it removed. You don't go to Shish for the food, is what we were told by friends later on that evening, and we back that statement. I guess you go there to drink and dance. I don't know if this Scenic will ever be interested in experiencing that aspect of Shish on a Saturday night, but who knows.... stranger things have happened.