Saturday, January 17, 2009

The WineSellar and Brasserie

I admit that restaurants with puns in their names worry me a little, so "WineSellar and Brasserie" bothered me. However, we had an excellent meal. I started with a squash soup, and continued with the lovely scallops shown above.
Lenny started with an Indian-spiced version of the scallops, including date chutney which I admired. He had the salmon with French green lentils, above, for a main course. Both my soup and his salmon included some delicious wild mushrooms.

Lenny's dessert, rice pudding, was topped with a sugar crust of the creme brulee variety, and garnished with fabulous cherries. I had the port-sauced pear halves with vanilla ice cream. The sauce was lightly flavored with black pepper -- quite nice. A shortbread wedge was good too as were the tiny madelines served at the very end with the check. The waiter didn't know how to pronounced the name; I didn't mind and certainly didn't correct him: he was quite good natured and appropriately attentive throughout the meal.

The restaurant is located in a warehouse in an industrial park in what seems to be an obscure part of town even for locals -- and the floor beneath the very well-appointed restaurant is a very bare-bones wine shop with all the wine in crates on a poorly painted cement floor. So the atmosphere is eerie. We only found it because a colleague of Lenny's suggested it.

To make our destination seem even more strangely located, our GPS ordered us to go there by a very indirect route. Plus all those miles and miles of hotels, businesses, condos, and retail shopping centers were empty desert last time we looked.

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