If the service is the best thing about Perle, the second best thing about this restaurant is its extensive vegetarian selections. Despite the obvious benefits of adopting a vegetarian lifestyle, even if only occasionally (and yes, I’m sorry, Carnivores, but the benefits are obvious. If cutting out beef from one’s diet is the easiest and most impactful way for most people to reduce their carbon footprint, then it’s clear what the right action is here), the scarcity of vegetarian options on most restaurant menus borders on the discriminatory. To its credit, Perle offers vegetarian counterparts to many of the dishes on the regular menu. After I was seated, I was given two menus; one regular and one vegetarian. I love this! Wish more restaurants would be as enlightened.

Partly to maximize variation in our respective experiences of Perle and partly because I’m not a dessert person and can foresee no use for the gâteau that would punctuate the end of the set menu, Charlie and I varied our ordering method for this meal. Forgoing, then, the prix fixe menu that Charlie opted for (even though there was a vegetarian version of it), I decided to order à la carte: the escargot to start, followed by the French onion soup, then truffle pasta for my main dish.

There was a vegetarian version of the escargot, with mushrooms as ersatz snails, but I have no qualms about eating snails, which I consider more insect than animal (it’s a loophole), so I asked for the real thing. This appetizer, pistachio-panko encrusted “wild Burgundy snails” drowning in herbed butter, sounds better as a concept than it actually tasted. It had been years—decades, in fact—since I last had escargot; I have fond memories of this French restaurant in Taipei where I would enjoy these plump, buttery, just-the-right-amount-of-chewy snails, but whether because my memories have been sweetened by the (many) intervening years, or whether Taiwan snails are simply superior to Burgundy ones, the escargots I got at Perle didn’t taste as good as how I remembered. I offered one of my snails to Charlie since he’d never had one before, and as he tried it, he gave me a quizzical look and an unconvinced, “Ok-aaay…” By the way, the herbed butter is VERY pungent, so this would NOT be a good item to order on a date night (unless you’re absolutely sure you don’t want ANYTHING to happen at the end of the night!).

The highlight of the evening, for me, was the French onion soup. Usually, this is a delight that is denied me as most chefs use beef broth, but at Perle, finally, after years of searching, I found a vegetarian version of the French onion soup I craved. Oh. My. God. It was a small cup of heaven. If it wouldn’t have been so weird, I would’ve been perfectly happy to order five bowls of that soup; if I had nothing else for my meal except for that French onion soup, I would’ve been extremely content.

As it was, the entrée that followed that divine French onion soup was a huge letdown. My entrée was a white plate of boring rigatoni pasta (pasta should not come in so many different shapes and sizes, especially since some of those shapes and/or sizes are just plain wrong. Rigatoni isn’t as terrible as gnocchi or orzo, but it’s not as exciting as capellini either) with a boring white sauce. There were some truffle shavings on top of the pasta. That’s all. Look, I know that black truffles are rare and expensive, and I recognize that they have a distinctive flavor, but when all’s said and done, aren’t truffles a condiment? So, to recap: My entrée was a plate of pasta with some seasoning. I guess I should’ve realized what I was ordering as the menu did list all the ingredients in the dish; i.e., “Fresh-shaved summer black truffles, handmade rigatoni, velouté,” so perhaps it was unreasonable of me to have expected more, but, when I’ve ordered pasta in the past at other restaurants (often for far less than $50), they always came with vegetables, or seafood, or something. Perhaps if I hadn’t been conditioned to have such high expectations for my pasta; if I had grown up as a street urchin in Mumbai, accustomed to having nothing to pair with my staple foods, I wouldn’t have been so disappointed by this entrée.