By Jonathan Kay
Dear reader, I see that you have returned after my critique on District’s six-dollar quesadillas. Today, unfortunately, I come to you in bitterness rather than enjoyment. You see, I have been scorned. Scorned by my peers. Scorned by my friends. Scorned by even my own family for having this controversial opinion: Tatte is mid. Aggressively mid. I can honestly say that I have never had such a mid dining experience in my entire life, and I am exceptionally tired of pretending Tatte is anything but mid at best.
Let’s start with the item that has received the most undue amount of clout I have ever witnessed: the minty lemonade. I’ll admit, it looks cool. And it is indeed magical – only in the sense that it has cast a spell on people, causing them to pretend that it is anything but bottled lemon rinds. It literally stings as it coats the throat. It’s overly sweet to the point where it more closely resembles lemon starbursts that have been juiced into a ginger solution than it does lemonade. Also, as you may have noticed, I said ginger. Ginger, in my humble opinion, does not belong in lemonade. To assert otherwise is behavior emblematic of someone more devastated by the brutalist architecture that intermittently populates the school than the mass layoffs of the people that keep them clean and functioning (topic for another day). Before I transition to another point, I must also mention that, for me personally, I am a firm believer that leaves should never be ingested through drinking.
Now I can’t tear down every item on the menu (partly because I haven’t had all of them and partly because I’m lazy), so let’s transition to talking about the atmosphere. Tatte has a cool design. At first glance. Then you look up at the ceiling and notice that it has fans that limply spread around the hot air within the building like one would expect to see in a JFK-era gymnasium. Then you inspect the ceiling tiles that look as if they were ripped straight from the greasiest local pizzeria. To top it all off, there are four menus – each with their own unique items – all located in painfully inconvenient and separate locations spaced throughout the building. In the mind of many Colonials, this environment serves as the perfect, quirky study spot. However, dear reader, I must ask you to reconsider your experience at Tatte. Is it really as good as the GW zeitgeist claims it to be?
So next time someone proposes a weekend brunch session at Tatte, I urge you to have them read this article and instead to head over to Peets like any true gold-and-blue-blooded Colonial.
