Restaurant Week!

We LOVE Restaurant Week around here. Check it out at www.restaurantweekboston.com. All the participating restaurants offer a three course meal for a fixed price. Some people act fancy and say prix fix. Lunch is $20.09 and dinner is $33.09. Appetizer, entree, and DESSERT! I'm sure you can figure out the significance of the 09 cents... (hint: the year is 2009).

I spoiled myself this week. On Tuesday I got to have lunch with A! We joined S & J at Clink. The building used to be a jail, and is now the fancy Liberty Hotel. Lunch was delicious. I started with a peach/pear soup. It was creamy and warm, which surprised me. Most fruity soups are cold. It was delicous. Three of us had the cuban pork sandwich for the entree. The bread was inside out! Picture a baguette sliced in half ready for sandwich making. Then flip over both sides and make the sandwich on the crusty side. It was panini'd so the "inside" of the bagquette was all buttery and toasted. It was a delicious sandwich that came with a side of sweet potato fries. For dessert, it was the apple cranberry cobbler all around. I learned that I like the fruit in my cobbler baked more than left intact as raw fruit. The puff pastry topping and vanilla bean ice cream was superb! We left there stuffed.

On Wednesday, 7 of my coworkers and I trekked over to Smith & Wollensky (always a good bargain for restaurant week, because it's uber expensive). I started with the split pea soup. It was good, but a little gritty for me. I guess that's the naturalness of the pea coming through. It felt wholesome. For the entree, I enjoyed the filet mignon steak sandwich (medium rare) which came with a few giant sweet potato wedges and a pickle. For dessert (two hours later), I had to go with the chocolate cake. It was GIANT. I brought most of it back, and you won't believe this, gave the leftover to a coworker who was sick yesterday and couldn't come to lunch with us even though she had been looking forward to it for weeks. I shared my chocolate cake. I shared my chocolate cake. I shared my chocolate cake. I will survive. (She super appreciated it, being as there is no cupcake cart that comes around at 3pm every day).

I learned a few things at Smith & Wollensky.
1. The castle it is located in was built in 1891 to house the first US Army Corps Cadets.
2. It later turned into an armory and then a museum.
3. As part of the restaurant's lease they are obligated to display the museum artifacts (civil war flags, guns, etc).
4. Anyone (even you!) can go into Smith & Wollensky and ask for a tour at any time. A manager will show you the museum items on all four floors.
5. Lunch is not supposed to take longer than one hour. Ours took almost 3!
6. Smith & Wollensky management understands the problems with a super long lunch. (They made our entire bill FREE and gave us a free creme brulee for the table!)

In conclusion, I LOVE restaurant week.