Friday, July 30, 2010

Small Plates

On Thursday, my girlfriend too me out on a date to Small Plates. It's a tapas like place in Harvard Square. We had a very solidly good meal there. We had:

Blue Cheese Raclette - This was the first thing to come out, and it scared us a little - it was really small. It was an intensely flavorful cheese with tomato and potato. I like a flavorful cheese, but I needed some of the table's bread on which to spread it. Good, though.

Garlic Soup - Very good, both creamy and garlicy. There was a monster croƻton afloat in the middle of it, and that was incredible, mostly on account of all the butter in it.

Pissaladiere - It's a sort of specialty of theirs . . . phyllo dough with toppings. Ours was peaches and a cow's milk feta. The feta here is pretty intense, but I liked it. The peaches and feta was an odd pairing, but science teaches us that fortune favors the bold.

Ricotta Gnocchi - This gnocchi was the best I've had outside of Italy. The sauce was decadently creamy, and the pasta was near the biting-into-a-cloud sensation that it's supposed to have. The sauce was pretty mushroomy, for which I didn't care, but I was glad to find somewhere making strides towards good gnocchi.

Drinks/Desserts: In keeping with my ongoing affair with ginger, I had the ginger lemongrass juice to drink - unfortunately it wasn't very good. At the end of the evening, my young lady had had enough to eat, and I didn't see anything that really grabbed me.  so we didn't have a dessert.

I highly recommend this restuarant for three reasons. The first is the delicious food - it was all excellent. The second was the menu, in that I felt like I had choices, and that I could come back and order different, interesting things (the bruschetta, the potato and beet salad, the changing specials.) The last is the patio. I love to dine al fresco, be it on a roof or in a garden, or on a terrace. Their's was hidden in back, quiet and out of the way.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Le Meritage

Last night, my girlfriend and I went to Le Meritage, one of the restaurants in the Boston Harbor Hotel. One of my friends was organizing a dinner there, and thought we should come. We looked at their menu on line before we went, and although ambivalent, and we figured we'd give it a try.

The restaurant is very impressive - crystal chandeliers, old maps of Boston on the walls, and a great view of the harbor. And because they attempt only one seating at dinner (some tables rolled over, but most didn't), we were given as much time as we wanted to to sit and chat. And it gave us an excuse to dress up.

Our ambivalence about the menu was, in the end, well justified. The menu had many many interesting dishes - two of which were meat-free.  Also, they offered two salads (which were not on the menu). So we were able to try everything.

Onion Soup - The waiter brought around a taste of onion soup as an amuse-bouche. It was quite good.

Salad - Mixed greens, presented wrapped in cucumber. I thought the presentation was cool (as a cucumber, I suppose).

Tomato Soup - A thick soup with half cherry tomatoes in it. The waiter brought over a bowl with the tomatos in it, and then poured the soup in at the table. Good, but not as good as the soup at The Cellar.

Risotto - A very delicious dish, with squash and orange peppers. I don't know if I've ever had bad risotto - but I liked this quite well.

Dessert - For our party of seven, we got two orders of the sampler. It was eight different dishes, which I liked because there were only five desserts on the menu. There was a creamy lemon dessert topped with ginger that was quite good.

The food was good, but unimaginative and unmemorable. There was nothing special about it. It doesn't make me say "Wow" or "I wish I could do that," but a rather  technical "This is very good." Which is very nice. But at over $75 per person, I want to be blown away, and I wasn't.