Plus, I Hate This Place

Milles Crepes Cake -- Lady M Confections
Lady M Confections

Before we even get our grubby hands on the Best Thing I Ever Ate dish, Lady M Confections commits at least five cardinal sins of our eating tour.

Cake that Needs to Go to Confession

1. They are located on the Upper East Side, a location we find inconvenient because it is just so very wide and so very far from either of us.

2. Appropriate to the neighborhood location, the place itself is sterile -- white walls devoid of doo-dads surrounding white modern tables and chairs. "They could stand for some art," Ginger observes.

Well, Doesn't This Look Warm and Inviting?

3. The place is overcome with non-English speakers.  In fact we seem to be the only people, aside from the staff, who is conversing fluently in English.  It seems even the Upper East Side residents avoid this place.

4. The ordering process features the most confusing bout of logistics ever, so scarily intimidating that it causes Ginger to go running out of the premises until Vodka arrives.  This system, or lack thereof, is compounded by some misleading signage which states that we cannot sit at a table until we are escorted by a staff member, yet in Twilight Zone-fashion, we are incapable of getting a staff member to wait on us.

And Speaking of Incorrect Signage, Those Are Eclairs, Lady M. Even We Know That

5. The wait for both a staffer and an actual slice of cake is unnecessarily slow.  Apparently, the workers at Lady M Confections never got the memo that they are employed in New York City and are expected to move quickly.

Finally, after entirely too many minutes of hovering at the glass-encased pastry counter with half the population of Europe and Asia, we are "taken" to our very own table (the same empty table we had been standing next to for the last fifteen confusing minutes).  The waitress places two glasses of iceless water in front of us, which Ginger starts gulping madly, explaining how she was "ice skating all day."  A solid ten minutes later, while in the middle of her second glass, she blurts out, "Oh, it's lemon!"

"What now?" Vodka asks.

"The water is flavored with lemon.  I couldn't figure out what that flavor was and thought they were trying to poison me."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we will never be foodies: the inability to recognize the flavor of lemon.

Add a Slice of Lemon to the Glass Next Time, Will You?

Finally, when we have already managed to criticize every aspect of Lady M Confections besides its food, we are given the Best Thing I Ever Ate choice itself: the milles crepes cake, as recommended by Ted Allen on the FRENCH FAVORITES episode.

Our Ordering Process Might Have Gone More Smoothly Had We Known How to Pronounce "Milles"

To be fair, the cake is pretty.  Featuring twenty ultra-thin crepes stacked up on top of one another, a barely-there spread of custard between each one, this slice is a triumph in craftsmanship.

We just wish we could say the same about its taste.

And Its Ability to Withstand the Pierce of a Fork

Because the thing is, the cake just doesn't taste like much.  For all of its visual attraction, the cake is monotonous in both texture and flavor, featuring bland crepes and barely-sweet cream.

Boring Cakes R Us

Ginger decides that the whole cake could be improved by a bit of fruit, or at least a fruit-flavored sauce, like raspberry or lemon (though if it were the latter, it might take her ten minutes to put her finger on the flavor).

There Go Our Hopes for a James Beard Award

Eventually, rather than eating the cake via forkfuls, we start pulling off the crepes one at a time.  While this method makes for a slight improvement, as we are better able to taste the burnt sugar coating on the outside layer, it does not do nearly enough to combat our increasingly sinking opinions of the establishment itself.

Dull Any Way You Slice It

Throwing a bit of discarded crepe back on the plate with a flourish of disdain, Vodka states, as if she has been making an audible list of Lady M's faults (and as if she is forced to come here often), "Plus, I hate this place."

And that pretty much sums up the problem.

Someone Pass the Taste

We receive our bill, only to learn that not only have we been charged $10 for one measly hunk of unsatisfying cake, but that the gratuity (of which they deserve none) has already been added in.  Ginger comforts herself in the knowledge that she has used her hard-earned $5 to purchase two glasses of free water along with this unappetizing cake, and we make our way out of Lady M Confections in a huff.

A Huff and a Cream Puff

Because heaven knows that if the only nice thing we have to say about a place is their abundance of water, there is a much larger problem at hand.

Lady M Confections's Milles Crepes Cake: 2 stars