Food critic Warren Bobrow digs into Morristown’s Urban Table

By Warren Bobrow

Please let me preface this piece by saying that the Urban Table, gleaming in every way, is a friendly place where they seem to try extremely hard to please the customer. But there is a disconnect between pleasing and the food, which is only a few steps up over fast food.

Two recent meals at the several-weeks-old Morristown restaurant are a study in incongruities. Everyone, from the hostesses at the meet/greet station by the front door to the busing staff, offers enthusiastic greetings and on leaving, warm goodbyes.  I could do without the “well meaning” handshakes though.  It’s a bit off-putting to shake hands with a wet-handed busboy after a quick burger and onion rings for lunch.

The first meal at Urban Table was nearly inedible.  My wife and I wanted a late dinner– it was a Monday night, the place was sparsely filled with customers.  Our waitress greeted us warmly, telling us her name and that of another man who “will be taking care of us this evening.”

This friendly greeting is some kind of new way of welcoming customers that many restaurants, from the “fast casual” to more expensive offerings, are employing.  Please let me say, I don’t care what their names are.  I’m not there to be their friend.  You can’t eat friendliness or handshakes.

We sat and were offered menus. The water glasses were filled by a well-meaning busboy.  Unfortunately, the young man rested the water pitcher wrapped with a bar towel on the lip of my glass and on the lip of the glass of everyone else’s glass around the room.  This strange technique of resting the pitcher on my glass caused me to not drink from this glass for the remainder of the evening. It was just unsanitary.

The voluminous menu seems to offer the “something for nearly everyone” approach to dining.  There is sushi and burgers, some fish dishes, burritos, salads– just about anything that anyone would like to eat in modern, read “trendy,” food.

In many ways, Urban Table could be located in any town, anywhere in the country. You walk in and instead of celebrating Morristown’s Colonial heritage, you hear deafeningly loud music and are surrounded by “Urban” cityscapes and lighting.

It’s all conceptual on a design level, without much follow-through from a culinary standpoint.  I didn’t come to Urban Table for the interior design. Although somewhat attractive, again, it just doesn’t fit the image of Morristown. Just my opinion.

The food is mostly flavorless and at times, overly salty.  The kitchen staff must have taken the night off the first time we dined.  I ordered a Caesar salad inexplicably spelled Ceasar on the menu. (Steak frites is strangely spelled Frittes on the menu. Creative license?)

It’s possible to have this tangle of salad topped with anything from chicken to a hunk of skirt steak. My salad lacked the basic balance of flavors.  A good Caesar salad should be tangy and crisp.  There was a thick veneer of salt on my steak.

To my palate, salting is an art, not a science or something that is learned from recipes.  It takes great finesse to use salt in the restaurant setting. At Urban Table that art is not in evidence. The dressing on the Caesar salad lacked balance.  It had none of the garlic and lemon elements of a well prepared freshly made Caesar salad dressing.  The flavor in the dressing was inexpensive salad oil; the salad greens were glossy with it.

The skirt- steak was nearly inedible due to the heavy hand with salt in the kitchen.  My wife ordered the burger, enthusiastically described by our server as the best anywhere.  It was served as a shriveled puck of darkened and charred meat. Certainly, she asked for it cooked a bit more on the side of well done. What was served was more akin to something left unsaid in polite company.

After this unfortunate meal, I went back to Urban Table for lunch.  It’s deafeningly louder.  The tables are tightly packed together making conversation nearly impossible.  A few more inches between the tables would go a long way toward making Urban Table a friendlier place.  I’m just not interested in listening to the people on both sides of me as if they were sitting in my lap.

At lunch the service staff is cordial and kind.  They introduced themselves with their names and that they will be “taking care of me” which is just not what I want to hear.  I like to hear that the food is the draw, not the wait staff’s name or the name of the back waiter.

Lunch can be frenzied at Urban Table.  My water glass sat empty for three-quarters of the meal as if I asked for it not to be filled, while tables on both sides of me had their glasses filled immediately when emptied.  Food comes out of the kitchen quickly, but without any seasoning or flavor.

Managers roamed the room shaking hands and saying hello and goodbye to customers.  The music was more than deafening– maybe this is what diners want?  Do they want cheap fast food in a casual setting?  It’s certainly not inexpensive with a glass of beer costing more than six dollars.  Lunch for one can be more than 20.  Urban Table says on its menu that they use local, fresh ingredients.  I fail to see anything on the menu that is locally grown.

The food at Urban Table is hardly farm to table.

At the end of the day the food is okay, but not great at Urban Table.

Warren Bobrow was born and raised on a farm in Morristown, NJ. He is a classically trained saucier/chef.  He is a food/spirits journalist with over three hundred published articles internationally. A rum judge for both the Ministry of Rum and the Barbados Rum Festival, he is a good person to have a cocktail with. Warren writes about Biodynamic wine for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Edition 2.