Restaurant Weak

It has been suggested that I would like to be Steve Barnes. With all due respect, that just isn’t true.  He does his thing, and I do mine.  And he does a great job of tirelessly staying on top of the food happenings in the region.

For example, yesterday he reminded readers about the Spring 2010 Downtown Albany Restaurant Week, which starts on Sunday.

The deal is pretty standard stuff.  The 21 participating restaurants have special event menus, some with more choices than others.  But they all offer three courses for the low low price of $20.10.  In general I love restaurant weeks because they give me the chance to try a bunch of new places where I might not have otherwise dined.  And if they are great, I’ll return.

If it weren’t for Steve, the whole thing would have likely passed me by.  As it is, I may not be able to put enough of my affairs in order to go out as much as I would like.  But that’s not your concern.

What may be your concern are the menus.

Restaurant week is a chance for restaurants to win over the hearts and minds of potential new regular customers.  It is in their interest to show off what they’ve got.  Granted, they need to do this within the constraints of food costs, since $20.10 is much lower than they would normally charge for three courses.

Still, there is no excuse for farmed Atlantic salmon.
(Did you see that coming?  It’s been a while.  But I have limited my salmon rant to two paragraphs.)

There are seven restaurants that have salmon on the menu that either explicitly call it Atlantic or do not specify its origin (which very strongly suggests that it is farmed).  That is a full third of the participants.  Here are the restaurants that saw fit to include it on the menu: Envy Lounge, Café Capriccio, Katrinella’s Bistro, Marché, McGeary’s, Hollywood Brown Derby, and the Victory Café.

While these restaurants should be ashamed for trying to pass off farmed Atlantic salmon as a culinary delight, I’m not going to hold it against them in my overall evaluation of their menu.

I broke the menus into three categories: Very Interesting, Probably Tasty, and Why Bother.

Of the 21 participants I found only three menus that were Very Interesting.  As expected the bulk of the restaurants, thirteen in all, had menus that I thought would probably be tasty, but weren’t terribly special.  A full five fell within Why Bother, almost a quarter of the participating restaurants.

So here is the good news.

At Marché, I would overlook their lapse in standards for sourcing the finest ingredients, and struggle between choosing the beef tartare (sirloin with black currant mustard, quail egg, and petite frisée salad) or the scallop ceviche (fresh lime, cucumbers, and spicy habañero gazpacho) to start my meal.  The roasted chicken breast comes with flageolet bean ragout and house-made andouille sausage.  Naturally it is the sausage that got my attention.  My thought is that the house-made cheesecake trio would be better than the strawberry rhubarb tart at this point of the season.  So the dessert choice would likely be driven by my optimism or pessimism with the quality of ingredients sourced by the restaurant.

Despite the black mark of the farmed Atlantic salmon, Café Capriccio’s menu was in the top three.  I would look forward to their broccoli di rape with white beans, olive oil & garlic and their eggplant with four cheeses, in a light tomato sauce.  Plus this would be a good opportunity to see how their ragu bolognese with fresh-made pasta stacks up to mine.  They also got bonus points for serving desserts from Crisan bakery.

The one menu that stood out above all others was for a place called Kelsey’s.  But that also makes me nervous.  Because I have stayed at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, and Kelsey’s Restaurant seems to be part of Kelsey’s Irish Pub, which serves overpriced bar food during the day, and a hodgepodge of expensive, uninspired dishes in the evening.

But there can be no doubt that above all others, they have stepped it up for restaurant week.  Their regular menu has nothing like this: a salad of baby arugula with lemon verbena goat cheese, crystallized ginger, toasted pine nuts and white balsamic glaze; Seafood-Watch-approved Idaho trout with crayfish stuffing, green and white asparagus and a crayfish sauce; vanilla panna cotta with strawberries in sauce and pistachio biscotti.

Frankly, if I owned a nicer restaurant, and a hotel bar upstaged my Restaurant Week menu, I would be quite embarrassed.  Hopefully the downtown restaurants will do better next time.

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