Confused.

That’s the only word I can think of to describe Tuckahoe’s Thomas Stone Restaurant.  From the website, to the decor, menu, food, and the stone-cooking concept on which the restaurant is based — it’s all over the place.

I met the restaurant meetup at Thomas Stone last Thursday and was the last to arrive because of an accident on the Hutch.  Worried the place would be packed, I rushed inside, only to find out…

(sound of crickets)

The restaurant was dead empty.

I’m not kidding.  There were a handful of patrons at the bar (they might have been employees), but in the dining room, not a soul besides our group.  Tumbleweeds were drifting by.  Thursday night and no one’s eating here?  Uh oh.

The dining room was dark and vaguely depressing, with a hodgepodge of dissimilar artwork on the walls and no defined theme for the room. (A lounge singer on piano started wailing away like she was playing Mohegan Sun.  When a room’s completely empty, voices carry.  My ears hurt.)  “What is going on with the decor?” I asked the table above the din of live music.  We agreed the interior decorating discussion must have gone something like this:

“All right, we need wall art.  Pick up anything you see.  Spanish bullfighter painting?  Great.  Old black and white photo of Yankee Stadium?   Love it!  Do we have anything with Marie Antoinette?”

A section of one wall was filled with meaningful quotes in large writing like “Enter as friends, leave as strangers,” and “Love conquers all.”

Love may conquer all, but it doesn’t conquer my hunger.  Where’s our server?

She was nowhere to be found.  After dropping off our menus she disappeared completely, until after fifteen minutes I finally asked another server to go get her.  She came back and explained how the stone cooking worked (A granite stone is heated to 500 degrees, meat or vegetables are placed on top, and it’s brought to the table half-cooked, in theory so that you can finish cooking the dish yourself to the preferred level of doneness.  The menu also warns, “Do not touch the stone or BURN INJURY WILL RESULT”).

Our server recommended a few dipping sauces, like peppery parmesan.

“What is it?” someone at the table asked.

“It’s just ranch dressing with black pepper and some parmesan.”

Oh.

(A note about the menu: If you’re billing yourself as a stone-cooking restaurant, then why offer so few stone-cooked dishes?  I’d say 2/3 of the unfocused menu are dishes cooked away from the stone.  If you’ve got a concept, commit to the concept!)

Then again, the concept, is er, kind of flimsy.  Lori and Mike’s veggie appetizer came out sizzling away on the stone.

Then it was my skirt steak.

I dug the twice baked potato, and the steak itself was nicely seasoned and tender.  When it arrived at the table it was at about a medium rare; within minutes it was at my desired medium-well.  I quickly took the meat off the stone before it overcooked — and that was that.  And therein lies the problem.

When you go out for fondue or hot pot, you skewer, you dip, you stir, you throw things into a broth… the activity makes the experience.  With stone cooking, the dish is essentially already cooked, so the “activity” lasts all of two minutes, after which you’re left with a stone sitting on the table — an insanely hot one mind you — with no real use other than to potentially send you to the burn ward.  The more you think about the concept,  the sillier it seems.  The draw is the novelty and the “ooh… aah” factor.  It’s a $28 version of Chili’s sizzling fajitas.

At the end of our meal, we were each presented with a little box — cutely called “Pandora’s Box” — that contained our bill, a rewards card and a comments card.  As someone at the table astutely pointed out, “Aren’t there bad things in Pandora’s Box?”  I went home and looked up the exact definition, which reads as “The box carried by Pandora that contained all the evils of mankind.”  I’m thinking management may want to rename the box.

The best part of the Pandora’s Box?  The collection of rocks at the bottom with a label that said, “Do not eat the rocks.”

You know what that means?  Someone DID try to eat the rocks!  Good thing they’re not heated to 500 degrees.

I do feel slightly bad for being so harsh, because the servers were very nice and I’m not looking for any restaurant to fail; I can only imagine how difficult it must be to hit your stride.  But I’ll leave you with this thought — Thomas Stone advertises itself as:

“The first authentic stone cooking restaurant in New York”

… and maybe the last.

GRADE: C

Thomas Stone Restaurant & Piano Lounge
106 Main St.
Tuckahoe, NY 10707
914-779-0012