Beast Blog

Is that a cafe, now? Last time I was there, it was a relatively-high-turnover, linen tablecloths, crappy service type restaurant. Nice place, though, if those things have changed.

Well, I ate there last night, and I can tell you it still has linen tablecloths. It's actually very charming inside.

The service wasn't crappy, but it wasn't stellar either. It was.... serviceable.

The food was quite good, and the portions were excessive. (Which is odd, in my experience, for a French restaurant). We couldn't finish our meals, and have leftovers to hold us for one more night.

Which makes the sting of the price less painful -- entrees range from $13-$22, which we weren't expecting. It's disappointing how few good simple French bistros there are around.

Unless things have changed here is the lowdown on La Bateau Ivre, I went there at least a few times a month for a year or two back when I lived nearby:

1) The front place is a cafe, there is a "restaraunt" in the rear with a different menu. The service in the front will get very very crappy whenever the restaraunt in the back is full. They seem to be permanently understaffed.

2) The food can be anywhere between stellar all the way down to terrible, and is consistently more expensive than you might expect, especially for basic items.

3) The real secret of this place is the beer on tap which become extremely cheap when you go for the big sizes. Once upon a time it was hard to find a place in Berkeley that served beer in a litre stein, but there was always La Bateau Ivre. An excellent place to grab a giant litre black & tan over sausage and potatos with friends.

4) The owner can usually be spotted lounging near the bar with a friendly scowl accross his face and a white t-shirt on. You can spot him easily by first taking a look at his charming british bull dog tied up around back then scanning the restaraunt patrons for the fellow with the same grumpy/friendly demeanor as the dog. It always tickles me when people and their pets look alike.

I wonder if their wi-fi is official or if the owner simply has it setup in his office upstairs and isn't technically saavy enough to WEP up the service?

"The Drunken Boat" (Le Bateau Ivre) does indeed have good, free wireless (802.11b) ... It is in fact "official" in the sense of it not being an afterthought. Its a private wireless LAN, for use by patrons.

As to whether the owner is savvy enough to "'WEP up' the service", as speculated on in another person's posting:
Technical knowledge was applied not to encrypting a system meant to be open, but rather to getting strong, fast coverage and good WAN bandwidth: we (guess who helped set it up?) added a booster and a hardwired slave transmitter to the secondary router, downstream to the DSL modem/router. BW is a solid 1.5Mb/.385Mb, with critical components on UPS.

The place has always been a combination cafe and restaurant, with three different rooms each having it's own style, including one with a fireplace.

-Rocky

I think more places should offer wireless access for thier patrons. It would probably bring in alot more business and they would easy recoup their costs.
I read in Wired Mag about a lil mom and pop shop that started offering free internet to it's customers and there business shop up by %600 in the first 6 months.
Anywho, I'll have to hit up that Drunken boat place.

Nice site