Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Meal

One day at work a magical card that gives me free dinners for some reason appeared on my desk.  Of course, I thought this must be a mistake so I set out to use it before someone figured it out and took it back from me.  So we set out for Marche, which I have always wanted to eat at.  Marche is located at 833 West Randolph and its website is http://www.marche-chicago.com/.  Marche serves what seems to be French bistro food.

As soon as we walked up I commented that the place looked almost cavernous (and big restaurants are always trouble).  Needless to say, I was a bit disturbed even before we went in.  I ordered the lobster bisque because lobster bisque has a special place in my heart as the first "nice" thing that I ever ate.  In the 20 or so years that I've been eating lobster bisque, I've never had one as flavorless and generally awful as the one at Marche.  It was thin, watery, unsalted, and had no lobster or lobster flavor at all.  Other than that, it was fine.  Curiously, the manager came over to see what was wrong.  I said that I was content just to move onto my next course, but he insisted (almost as if he knew something was wrong with the bisque) that I get something else.  I ordered the french onion soup, and it was pretty good.  It was the salty version, which I prefer to the sweet onion version.  The bread was slightly crisped which is the proper way to do it.  The cheese was extremely hot since I think they just made it.  Anyway, here is a picture of the lobster bisque.

For my main course, I ordered a skirt steak with bernaise sauce.  Inexplicably, it came coated in some sort of red wine sauce.  Even more improbably, they put the bernaise sauce on the side.  I can only assume they would hope I wouldn't notice the wrong thing being on there.  The sauce they ended up putting on it wasn't even good.  Everything was so bad that we just ended up opting out of dessert. 

Just to pile on further...for some reason the chefs just stood around for nearly the entire dinner.  I'm not sure who was making the food, but it certainly wasn't the guys who were standing near the stove.  Generally the decor looked like something that was designed by a person who just took 11 hits of acid.  The whole time I imagined that Gordon Ramsay would pop out at any second and start yelling things like "you donkey!" or "disgusting!"  Marche has soured me completely on the other restaurants owned by the same group: Red Light, Opera, and Gioco.  

In a possibly related note, I heard Marche is closing, so you will not accidentally end up there.