in a good way!! There is real value in a solid neighborhood restaurant - someplace fairly causal that has tasty and affordable dinners. I believe this falls into the category of affordable luxuries or mini splurges - which most often get spent on food in our household. In Boston, our neighborhood spot was the deep, dark comfort food spot Zon's. I always have the mac and cheese. Even when I go in saying "I think I'll try something different this time..."
The new Zon's or the current contender for the role of neighborhood restaurant is Loie Fuller's on Westminster St. A hop and skip through the park from our new place. The decor is intensely art deco complete with fantastic sconces and woodwork undulating across the walls. The beer and wine list is tremendous, says V who knows these kinds of things, and the prices are entirely reasonable.
Anyhow, we were seated next to some young gents who were enjoying a plate of escargots and we immediately thought "when in Providence..." and ordered up a plate for ourselves. After what seemed like a half hour of coaxing them out of the shell, I got my first taste. Something like mushroom meets calamari - dark and dirty tasting but in a good way. Slightly chewy but definitely not tough. The snails pace was followed by sole and brussel sprouts for me and wild boar and apples for V. We rounded out the evening with a strawberry lambic float. Yes please!
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Yay! Isn't that place AMAZING?? I can't wait to be your neighbor (crosses fingers, rolls eyes, we'll see) and we'll sip Belgian beers and eat snails together!
ReplyDeleteOMG that would be tremendous. We could go out for lambic floats!
ReplyDeleteJuly 2013: Tried real authentic Burgundy Escargot…very BIG snail shells in terms of size…for the very first (and last) time recently at a very fine (and very expensive) French Restaurant whose Executive chefs are both Frenchmen.
ReplyDeleteI was expecting escargot to taste something like clams, oysters, mussels, or scallops.
To me, snails do NOT taste like marine shellfish at all. The texture is similar (perhaps a little more mushy) but that is where the comparison ends.
Also, please note: ESCARGOT DO NOT TASTE LIKE CHICKEN!!!!
The problem I encountered was in addition to the snails’ own flesh, I could also taste the grass/other vegetation the snails had eaten. In other words, apparently the French leave the snails’ digestive tracts intact and do not remove them like one would hope a fine restaurant removes the vein from a shrimp. Frankly, I found the taste of the partially digested (by the snails) vegetation in their innards quite disgusting.
In other words, the butter and garlic sauce they are drenched in and served with, didn’t help at all with the taste of the snails themselves. I used the special pliers and the little two-pronged fork they come with, and after the first one, let my wife try one (she didn’t want anymore after the first one either…thought it was too salty…but it wasn’t too salty for me)…and then ate the rest of the little buggers as fast as I could.
I then took my bread and snarfed up the rest of the garlic butter sauce that was left. Which did have a slightly snail-y taste, but not enough to stop dunking my bread into the sauce.
Let’s just say it was the most expensive garlic bread I’ve ever eaten.
Am I glad I tried Escargot at least once in my life? YES.
Will I ever willingly order and eat Escargot ever again in my life? NO.
And I am NOT a typical “meat and pototoes American”. I’ve lived in one major Asian country several times and have visited and stayed in a few more. I love most various kinds of European and Asian ethnic cuisines much more than American food, and prefer fish and chicken and vegetarian sources of protein, as well as vegetables and fruits, to red meat or organ meats, both of which I rarely consume. My palate is not uneducated. Let’s just say that Snails just ain’t my thing.
‘Nuff said.
Escargot tastes like chicken, with a consistency of a oyster without the slime.
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