A true dining experience at Muse

After spending a year baffled by the idea of a fine dining restaurant in Swenson's, Rob and I decided to finally give Muse a shot Saturday night. Now I'm left wondering how to write about the experience and its many layers - where to begin?

The dining experience started with the fine dining standard: a choice between tap water, flat bottled and sparkling bottled, which always feels like a restaurant personality test to me, as though the waiters know what kind of customer I will be (and what kind of tip I will leave) based on my decision to that question... which is always tap. I wonder what that tells them?

Regardless, it might be unfair to call that the beginning of our dining experience because at that point, we had yet to meet our waiter for the evening, Sean. Rob and I are pretty well invested in the full dining experience - the service weighs just as heavily in our overall rating of the evening as the food.

The food, before I get ahead of myself, was wonderful. It was on the heavy side, which I think was more a matter of what we ordered than a true representation of the offerings. The seafood tasted of the ocean in a clean, crisp, amazing way. The vegetables were crisp and bright; the flavors in the sauces was complex and spot-on. The presentation was beautiful - artistic without being overly engineered. We were also given an amuse-bouche which was tasty and beautiful and is one of those little things restaurants can do to really go the extra step.

But Sean made the evening. It was immediately obvious that he is not from Greensboro but I was surprised to find he's been here for only a month. He seemed too together (or something - not sure how to describe it) to be such a recent transplant.

One of the big turn-offs of fine dining for Rob and me is the snob factor - the feeling that we should have achieved a certain familiarity with gourmet food and fine dining practices before attempting an upscale restaurant. We've only encountered that kind of snobbery a time or two but it always puts a big crimp in the dining experience.

Sean (and I mean this in an entirely positive way) was an inclusive snob - he clearly understands the food - not just what he likes, or key flavors, but also textures, complimentary dishes and appropriate presentation, both of the food on the dish and the dish on the table. But we never felt as though we were not a part of that experience, that we weren't living up to our end of the bargain. He answered even our silliest questions seriously without any reproach for not knowing culinary terms and he perfectly walked the line of being attentive but not intrusive.

Sean closed our meal by saying something to the effect of: There are many different kinds of waiters out there and, I can assure you, there are many kinds of customers. I really feel as though we worked well together tonight.

And that, my friends, was the best closing to a meal I've ever experienced. It reminded me of a story a therapist told me about a father/daughter trapeze team. The father says "if you look out for me and I look out for you, we'll be fine," to which the daughter replied, "No, if I look out for me, and you look out for you, then we'll both be fine." With his closing remarks, it seemed as though Sean was saying that he had lived up to his expectations of himself as a waiter and we had lived up to our hopes (of having a great meal and a great time) as diners and therefore we had all had a pleasurable experience. Beautiful!

I don't know if food is part of Sean's ongoing path, but if it is, I can see him becoming a maitre-d at a Michelin rated restaurant (a la JP in Hell's Kitchen).

(As a little sidenote, in case the fine folks at Muse end up reading this, the Web site, guys, looks like it was a template built for a fried fish joint - it doesn't come close to matching your elegance. Straightforward and simple wins that race.)