New Haven Restaurant Week Reports

[danieljdwyer]

Where have you eaten this week? How was it?

Here's my first two days:

Lunch on Monday at Thali was, as always, excellent. The appetizers I tried were the jinga Manchurian and the samosas. The jinga Manchurian has the right amount of spice to complement the shrimp without losing that sweet shrimp flavor. The cilantro flavor did not stand out, but the dish was very good without it. The samosas were good, though there's only so much you can do with potatoes, peas, and pastry. They do stand out as the best samosas in town, though, because of the richly flavorful sauce they are served with. For entrees, I tried the paneer sabji jalfraize and the fish tikka. I've had paneer dishes at other Indian places in town, and the paneer itself (not the sauce it's in) has always been bland and rubbery. This paneer was anything but; it had a firm texture without being rubbery or stringy, and was quite flavorful. The sauce was pleasantly spicy. The fish tikka was the best part of the meal. I really appreciate what Thali does with these kind of dishes. Where nearly every other Indian restaurant I've been to would cook the fish and vegetables all together, resulting in a brown mess on the plate with nothing cooked perfectly, Thali cooks the fish in the sauce, and serves this on top of the separately cooked vegetables. The result is a nice vibrant dish with everything cooked to perfection, with the yogurt and spices flavoring the dish just enough that the flavors of the fish and vegetables were not at all muddied. The naan and rice were, as always, delicious enough to eat on their own. Both desserts (mango kulfi and rice pudding, were good, but unremarkable.

I don't have much to say about dinner on Monday at Barcelona. I ate a lot of different things and they were all good. Twenty nine bucks for three tapas and dessert is an excellent price. If you go to Barcelona, get the crepas salgeuro for dessert.

Lunch Tuesday at Foster's was very good. I tried all seven dishes, and thought six were excellent. The lamb and gouda quesadillas were good, but the tortilla was cooked too hard. The lamb and gouda were cooked right and married well together, though I would personally have selected a less hammy gouda for this dish. The scallop phyllo packets were very good. If I were to nitpick, I'd say that this was simply too rich for a scallop dish; the sweetness of the scallops was almost lost. The coconut yogurt sauce was completely unnecessary, as the actual phyllo packets had enough flavor and moisture on their own. The sauce was also delicious, however, and made a good accompaniment to the scallops. The pulled pork was the best dish. The actual pork was perfectly executed, with the perfect amount of sauce, but the rolls were the highlight. They were so soft and buttery; absolutely the best rolls I've ever had pulled pork on. The seaweed coleslaw was a perfect match, but it could have used a little more vinegar and pepper. The tuna was well executed, and the wasabi mashed potatoes surprised me. I thought this was a stupid trend five years ago when it started, and never had any that changed my mind. Foster's version was quite good, with the wasabi flavor mostly in the background and roasted corn to bring a good balance to the flavor, which worked very well with the fish. The chocolate mousse was good, though it really needed all components of the dish to be well balanced. I finished the cookie with a few bites of mousse left, and those bites were disappointing. The creamsicle cake was surprisingly dense, and the composition worked well. Raspberries are one of the very few foods I don't care for, but the raspberry torte was well done.

Dinner at Bentara (not my choice) was very good, but I wouldn't recommend it for restaurant week. Unlike many of the other options, it's not a good bargain; the cost of my dishes from the regular menu added up to basically the same price as the restaurant week menu cost.

[lsnhc]

We have opted to forego restaurant week this time around. As our 15 yr old would have joined us, it would have made a weeknight dinner at least $150 after wine and tips. The fact is, I almost never order dessert and with a few exceptions, would not have spent much more than $30 on entree and appetizer at most of our "weeknight" places. In fact, if we dine out during the week, we generally will split an app and then onto entrees....and looking at the menus from several of the participants, you have to be wary of both what the restaurants are offering and, as in the case of Bentara, whether, in fact, the price actually reflects a "good deal."
Now....if they had included Sat night, that would have been another story.....

[danieljdwyer]

Foster's has extended the restaurant week offer through the weekend. They will be open Sunday and for lunch all weekend, which they are usually not. Both the lunch and dinner menus are a good deal.

[danieljdwyer]

Lunch at Heirloom Wednesday. It was my first time there and I'm absolutely sold. For some reason, I was expecting the place to be stuffy, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. The design is simple, modern, and very open. The service was friendly and unpretentious. We both had tomato soup for the first coarse, and it was delicious. It might be a very simple thing, but I'm always impressed by soup that comes out at the perfect temperature. I don't want to have to blow on each spoonful, and having my face over the bowl shouldn't fog up my glasses. But it should still be hot when I get to the last bite. It's not that hard, but it's something very few restaurants I've been to manage to do right. The soup was loaded with nice clean flavors, was coarse enough to have a real vegetable texture to it, but smooth enough to have a nice, creamy mouthfeel. Both of the mains, lobster fried rice and chicken quesadillas, were quite good. The lobster fried rice had a nice, natural sweetness to it, and all the individual flavors both stood out and worked in unison. The first few bites didn't really impress me, but I think that was because of the bitterness of my beer (more on that in a moment). After the first few bites, the delicious subtlety really shone through. The chicken quesadilla itself was well executed, but the lime crema really made the dish. There was a subtle spice to it that worked really well. Dessert was sorbet, not terribly exciting, but very good sorbet. There were a few overly large ice crystals in mine, but at least that shows it was made in house.
One complaint, about the beer. The nicer restaurants in New Haven need to get their act together on having better beer offerings. Beer lists need to consist of more than just mass market items like Sam Adams, Stella, Guinness, and Hoegaarden. There's a lot of good beer out there, and a lot of people are finally getting interested in drinking it. In addition to the seemingly ubiquitous mass market beers, they had one I'd never heard of, and now can't remember the name of, from Ipswich. It was very good, but did not pair well with the food. In retrospect, I should have gotten a Hoegaarden, but when I'm eating out and paying ten bucks for a beer, I'd rather have something I haven't been drinking since I was a teenager and that isn't the mass marketed product of a major conglomerate that values profit over quality.

[danieljdwyer]

I forgot to mention, while the bread was nothing special, the olive oil we were given with it was fantastic - one of the few I've had that had little bitterness or acidity. It was almost like a light olive oil, but with far more fruitiness than most extra virgin olive oils.

[shoes]

Thanks for the Thali write-up. We're going tor dinner tomorrow.

I'm curious - did they try to upsell you at Thali when you chose the Restaurant Week menu? When I was there for dinner a few weeks ago (not during a Restaurant Week), the waiter was pushing to get us to buy more wine, extra rice, breads, apps. It was a little off-putting. I have no problem saying "no, thanks," but the upsell efforts did mar an otherwise splendid experience. I wonder if the pressure will be on more during a promotional price period.

[danieljdwyer]

They didn't try to upsell me, but then, nowhere ever tries to upsell me. Most people assume I'm a Yale undergrad - I'm 26, but, unfortunately, look about half a decade younger than that, and am usually with my wife, whose age people seem to underestimate by about a decade, as she still gets asked when she's graduating from high school. In any case, I'm generally stuck fighting the assumption that I'm a cheap college kid.
And actually, so far, Thali is the only place that gave us only the restaurant week menu with no, "I'll just give you our regular menu too, in case you want to take a look."
Enjoy your dinner; the dinner menu looks great.

[danieljdwyer]

Dinner last night at Union League was disappointing, but I think restaurant week is just the wrong forum for them. Last restaurant week I ate lunch there and got the same feeling. I guess when you ask Union League to put together a three course menu for $29, you can't expect it to compare to their normal menu (on which most entrees are at least $29). Everything was well executed, and nothing was bad - we had the terrine, pea soup, confit, pike, mousse, and creme caramel - but everything tasted like corners were cut or too much was prepared ahead. For example, the confit had no flavor other than duck fat. Not bad, but very Culinary Classics 101.

Lunch today at Caseus was delicious, but not much of a bargain. Their mac and cheese is awesome, but it's $10 on the regular menu. Not sure how much the pot d'creme is normally, but it's definitely not enough to make $17 for the two courses a great price. We did get a few freebies, but it's the only lunch I've had this week that I felt I ate less than $20 worth of food. A small appetizer or even an amuse bouche would have gone a long way.

[danieljdwyer]

Dinner Thursday night at Ibiza was absolutely fantastic. I would not hesitate to say this is the best meal I've had in half a year, and the best meal I've had in New Haven in about two years - not coincidentally, it's been two years since I last ate at Ibiza. Unlike with Union League, there was no sense that they were cheapening down their usual food to make restaurant week a profitable endeavor. The one thing they did do was to overbook. We were not seated until about twenty minutes after the time of our reservation, but we did get great service at the bar while waiting. We also didn't get the typical bullshit about not being able to carry the bar tab over to your table, and having to settle before being seated. Our waiter provided impeccable service. We wanted a bottle of the same wine one of us had ordered from the bar menu, but had no idea what it was. He found out for us, and, when he discovered they had no unopened bottles left, found us a similar wine. Though the bottle we ended up with was listed at five dollars more than the one we had wanted, he charged us the lower price. The ravioles de cordero (lamb) were similar to the classic tapa commonly found inland in Spain, with a nice crisp to the exterior, and a soft, slow cooked interior of lamb shank steeped in its own juices. The sauce had a rich, creamy, but bright quality that brought it all up a level, and the addition of olives was a great touch. The scallop dish was one of the best preparations of scallops I've ever had. The scallops themselves were very fresh, and cooked perfectly. The passion fruit mango sauce was intensely flavorful, with a nice citrus edge, but did not diminish the flavor of the scallops at all. The grilled corn cakes were a perfect base for the dish. The salmon entree was perfectly executed, with a great balance coming from the combination of the bitterness of spinach, acidity of vinegar, and pistachioness of pistachios. I'd never had a potato confit before, so I was worried it might be overly oily. It was not especially oily at all, and, in fact, had a texture and flavor that made me think of a scalloped potato galette, just way thicker than any galette I've seen. The baby back ribs were appropriately tender (very obviously slow cooked) with a really great sauce - not like any of the classic American barbecue sauces, Spanish barbecue sauces tend more toward a sweet, herbal character. The potatoes were served wrapped in a cabbage leaf that was cooked very tender, but had no cabbagey flavor at all. Dessert was fantastic. The bread pudding was the best I've had, though the cinnamon, coffee flavor combination was a bit out of season. The crema catalana was a perfectly executed classic. If you've never had crema catalana before, it is not, as so often described, a creme brulee. It has a nice hard caramel top like creme brulee, but is runny inside. The flavor is sort of like really rich, melted vanilla ice cream. Crema catalana is always what I long for when I eat creme brulee.

[danieljdwyer]

Lunch at Zinc Friday, not my choice. Nothing good to say really. Tried all three mains and found them boring. The flavors in the risotto did not complement each other well. The stir fry was decent, but not comparable to that at any of the good Asian places in town - and for $17 at lunch, you better give me the best stir fry I've ever tasted. The shrimp was tasty, but I think I ate the same dish when I was five. Everything I've ever had at Zinc has either been like that - where maybe it was new and exciting in the 80's, but now it's standard home cooking - or else maybe it was avant garde in the 80's, but then people stopped thinking intentionally weird combinations of flavors were cool. I'm not a berry fan generally, but both desserts were bland even removing that from consideration. How one manages a bland sabayon is beyond me. It would have been nice to get something besides a main and dessert.

[danieljdwyer]

Dinner at Pacifico Friday was good, but not as good as other meals I have had there. The menu was a bit different than what was on the website, and they ran out of a number of things. The drinks at Pacifico are always good, particularly the caipirinhas. The crab cake appetizer was very good, as the crab cakes were well executed and paired with a well flavored mango jicama slaw. The Lobster quesadilla appetizer was good, but the chipotle flavor in the accompanying creme fraiche was barely detectable. Also, I find it odd that so many places out a quesadilla on their restaurant menu, but more odd that the one place that serves Latino food did not have the best quesadilla. I did not try to ceviche appetizer, but the shrimp looked precooked and the amount of liquid in the cup was greater than the amount of solid. The skirt steak was undersalted. It had a nice flavor profile, but the flavors were muted by the lack of salt. The plantain fried rice served with the steak was very good, but I would have liked more plantains. The lobster ravioli was the best dish of the night, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well they executed the actual noodle. The salmon dish was pretty good too, with the yucca hash adding an interesting note. Dessert was a let down, as they were out of both advertised options. The warm chocolate cake was very ordinary, and the flavor seemed not to fit with the scope of the rest of the food. It would have been great to have something that fits the strengths of the kitchen more, like the dulce de leche cheesecake they had run out of.