Here's a little unsolicited parenting tip: When seeking a babysitter for your children, pediatricians are awesome. Pediatricians who don't charge - even better. Fine, twist my arm, I'll let my sister babysit my kids.
We decided to try Citrus City Grille. It's a restaurant with three locations. We had been once for lunch after church with the boys. The lunch menu is much more family and budget friendly, in my opinion, but I knew on that visit that I'd like to come back for dinner with just DH, or just an adult crowd, so this gave us an excuse to try it out. I had already decided that I didn't want to spend the money on my three regular "favorite nice evening out" restaurants.
The results are a bit mixed.
The restaurant was empty, which doesn't surprise me for a Monday night in our community. We were seated by our server and asked for glasses of water.
Rack of Lamb was on the menu so I pretty much closed it right away. To be truthful, I wasn't wild about spending that much on an entree but nothing else on the menu sang to me as a worthy alternative. DaddyDoc chose the beef tenderloin with shrimp special. He ordered the butter lettuce salad with pears and gorgonzola. I chose the Santa Barbara heirloom tomato salad. I'd forgotten that this restaurant offers one of my all-time favorite desserts: Grand Marnier Souffle. We had dessert waiting for us at home but we decided to eat it another night and ordered Grand Marnier Souffle.
The busser brought us the bread and dipping sauce. The dipping sauce is amazingly good. It is a vinegar and oil sauce with spices in it. I couldn't tell you what. The sauce seems well emulsified - it doesn't separate. And it's YUMMY. We downed the entire basket and our water glasses were empty by the time the waiter brought the bottle of Petite Syrah that we had ordered. The problem wasn't that we ate too fast. It seemed to take awhile for our water to get refilled and for the wine to arrive. I suspect that if the restaurant had been more crowded, the busser would've been around more often to help our server more. He wasn't. The server wasn't. I got antsy because I was thirsty.
The wine came and it smelled good and tasted good. It was EOS Reserve Petite Syrah from Paso Robles.
Our salads came shortly after. Mine was very amusing. The appearance reminded me of the compact salad at Catal, without the evil walnuts. It was a stack of chopped tomatoes topped with a pistacho crusted patty of goat cheese. There were sauces on the plate around the tomatoes. I love heirloom tomatoes. They're so flavorful. I have found that a good tomato tastes better with salt. Tomatoes and avocado, in my world, DEMAND salt. But the server told me to break the stack, mix in the cheese and the sauces and eat the salad. So I made a mess of that salad to mix everything up and I took a bite. Hmmm. I added salt, took another bite, and added more salt.
The salad was ok. It wasn't the best heirloom tomato salad ever. I've had better at both Napa Rose and Catal's Uva Bar. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't $13 good. There wasn't enough sauce and the tomatoes just didn't burst with flavor as I ate them. If the salad hadn't had the highest price point on the menu, I probably would've been less disappointed. So I can't really say the salad wasn't good - it just didn't meet my expectations. The pistachio crusted goat cheese was yummy. If the tomatoes had more flavor, I would've really enjoyed it. We both thought Doc's salad was good. Daddy Doc especially enjoyed the dressing. I hadn't tasted a pear prepared like that before and it was very good.
Next came our entrees. Daddy Doc enjoyed his shrimp and his tenderloin. The mushroom risotto that we both had with our entrees had big slices of mushrooms in it and was very good. My rack of lamb had about 4 pieces of lamb. It was ok. The zinfandel sauce that had been on my plate was 'dried' on the plate. It looked like the chef had plated the dish and it sat on a warmer somewhere for awhile and dried out. That was unfortunate. And disappointing. I'm sort of realizing in retrospect that is what happened. I wish I'd realized it last night because I might have sent the plate back and asked for fresh sauce. Would that be gauche? I seriously don't remember being disappointed by a meal at this price point before but the more I reflect on the dinner, the more "problems" I see... The plate was VERY hot when it arrived and I, again, retrospectively realize that all the puzzle pieces are coming together...
I finished before Daddy Doc and the souffle was ready. The server asked me if I would rather wait for Daddy Doc to finish his meal before bringing the souffle. I asked him to bring it for two reasons - first, I adore and appreciate Auntie Doc greatly but I always feel bad when a "free" sitter is at home and I knew she was planning on driving home that night. Second, souffles always come out too hot and need to cool so I figured it would have time to cool while DD finished his dinner.
The souffle was good. The last time we were at this restaurant, their ovens were acting up and the souffle was burned. This time it was properly cooked. They serve it with a raspberry sauce. I much prefer the creamy grand marnier sauce served by The Cellar in Fullerton. Go ahead, call me spoiled, I can take it. But the souffle was good!
The problem was that I felt like I was going to explode so I wasn't able to eat as much souffle as I would have liked, nor finish my wine. Fortunately, my new Ann Taylor Loft Petite regular cut boot-leg jeans still fit like a dream, even as full as I was. (No, I'm not proud that I can fit into those pants, why do you ask?)
We left the restaurant stuffed. Daddy Doc gave our server a generous tip. But. I'm not sure we'll rush back for dinner. The menu didn't really jump out to me overall. For the price point, the meal did not, unfortunately, meet our expectations. The meal was not as expensive as our usual fine dining experiences but only because we went for a lower price point on the wine and skipped appetizers. Usually when we dine out we choose wines in the $60 to $80 range. This wine list had $30-40 wines and $100+ wines, not a lot of in-between on the "Other Red" list, which included Syrah, Petite Syrah, Zinfandel, Petite Noir, and others. It was quite a variety for "other red".
Next time we'll try one of the other "nice" restaurants in town or we'll go back to one of our regular favorites and cut out appetizers and lower our wine price point.
Posts
1 comment:
Hmmm, thanks for the interesting review. Sorry it didn't turn out as well as you'd hoped. Because of the location of the one I've been to, I doubt I'd be in the area for dinner, though I do enjoy the place for lunch.
Post a Comment