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 croûton 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.