You shouldn’t force yourself to enjoy a meal, no matter a restaurant’s hype, the glowing reviews of critics obviously far more knowledgeable than you, the bustling restaurant itself filled with a chic knowing clientele, the staff’s self-important swagger, the avant-garde food . . .

Case in point: Chateaubriand. Recently ranked No. 11 in S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2010. Highest ranked restaurant in France. And truly a case of the emperor’s new clothes.

The most important thing a restaurant must do is to serve good tasting food. I’ll allow service and accomodations to suffer if the food transports me to another place. Chateaubriand’s food, unfortunately, transported me back to every other meal I’ve had on this trip to Paris; I gazed fondly on them all and wished to be anywhere but Chateaubriand. Not that Chateaubriand’s food was awful (except in one instance), it just wasn’t memorable, neither bold nor imaginative, and certainly not avant-garde . . . unless you think putting Pop Rocks in dessert is avant-garde. (I guess chef Iñaki Aizpitarte needed something to tingle the tastebuds, since dessert was so pitifully pedestrian.)

Aizpitarte (according to S. Pellegrino) “has a particular penchant for deconstructing classics and reworking them, and also a focus on pared-back simplicity.” Take our choucroute garnie, for example. Raw cabbage, slightly dressed, replaced the sauerkraut. It tasted fine, but also seemed a tad lazy—or was it just pared-back simplicity? I’d’ve preferred pickled cabbage, which could’ve still retained the raw crunch Aizpitarte was looking for. That’s a minor complaint, however.

Our waiter informed us that there was sausage hidden among the great mounds of raw cabbage, but I’ll be damned if I found any. In fact, only D found sausage . . . pierced by his fork and held aloft, the sausage I first mistook for a wafer-thin slice of radish. Perhaps I ate mine without knowing it. I did, however, find a plethora of fish strewn about the raw cabbage. Unfortunately, our waiter never informed us of the fish, which he certainly should have considering the ratio of fish to the aforementioned sausage was 217-to-1. A little foreknowledge would also have explained the very unpleasant sensation of suddenly having the taste of rotten fish flood my mouth. At first I distrusted my tastebuds. Fish? You’re simply projecting after watching the guy next to you saw away at his third course of barbu fish, which, unlike ours, wasn’t even blessed with a wonderfully crisp skin. No skin for you! But then there it was again. Something fishy. Something rotten fishy. I trolled through the cabbage and found a little grey rubbery morsel and tasted it. Hákarl, perhaps? Whatever it was, it ruined the choucroute garnie for me. Was the fish meant to be smoked? That would’ve made sense. But not this extremely unpleasant piece of fish. And that’s when I gave up trying to like Chateaubriand.

The service we received was pretty decent until a stunning Japanese woman was seated one table away from us where she dined, unbelievably, alone. The all-male staff immediately forgot about us and the two-top next to us, reserving for her their undivided hirsute attention. Not that I can blame them; she was far more attractive than the food or the dreadful décor, which wasn’t spared even an afterthought.

The esteemed critics and foodies who gave Chateaubriand good reviews didn’t fall in love with the food, the service, the restaurant; they fell in love with the idea of the food, the service, the restaurant. As any navel-gazing intellectual will tell you, there’s virtue enough in good ideas.

A good idea would be for Aizpitarte to replace deconstructing classics with a little classic technique.