Stone’s Restaurant & Lounge

Address 
324 S. Main St., Stillwater, 651-439-1900, stonesstillwater.com

The Scene
Stone’s sits in the back of the historic Grand Garage, up a short flight of stairs. The spacious bar incorporates all the common design motifs of the modern casual chophouse—lots of gleaming wood, top-of-the-bar glass ice bins lit from above, pendant lighting, metallic finishes. The crowd is a mixed bag from the neighborhood—all grateful that the Stillwater dining scene has a new entrant.

Our Take
The phenomenally addictive cheese spread served with homemade pretzels is a great start, but each time we dined at Stone’s, it went downhill from there. The service lacks maturity and style and, at its price point, I expect a more experienced hand on the tiller. Seared tuna was sliced and drizzled with a mundane wasabi cream sauce and paired with a commercially prepared seaweed salad. Onion soup was too sweet and came with a mantle of mild white cheese that was decidedly not Gruyére. The burgers, however, were very good—crusty and beefy. Steamed mussels, salads, and won ton crisps were all, like the tuna, dismally low on flavor, yet high on presentation points. Priorities?

The steaks and chops were all decent—the lamb chops and rib-eye steak being the best of the coterie, but with steak house pricing, the customer deserves better meat, sauces, and more careful preparation. Stone’s can be summed up in one of its signature dishes: a tempura-style deep-fried Pacific lobster tail, served on a bed of sweet potato fries—the impossible-to-eat second-rate lobster rising vertically off the mound of listless fries, accompanied by an orange aioli for dipping. The ingredients all lacked the quality the idea deserves and batter-frying lobster in its shell prevents the diner from extracting the meat cleanly, or sometimes at all. Desserts are passable; four people can share one. Best were a chocolate torte paired with a berry sauce and a Lemon Icebox Cake, which came assembled on the plate rather than refrigerated overnight (“icebox”) to let the flavors marry.

Endangered Species
Perhaps it would be more instructive if we added the species chefus maximus to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s watch list of endangered species. Restaurants such as Stone’s, and its trompe l’oeil generation, seem to forget that restaurants eventually need a real chef in the kitchen, especially when menus need tweaking, staff turns over and needs training, and the dewy-eyed customer of the first month is replaced by the cynical second-year skeptic. Everyone wants the same magic that Ike’s and Zelo have, but those restaurants opened with menus of classic preparations of food that resonated and didn’t need reinventing. A chef who does not create his own menus—and can’t improve a dish on his own—is not a chef, he’s an assembly-line manager.