Schenectady Has a Restaurant Week Too

It feels just like yesterday that I missed Guilderland’s restaurant week. But while Guilderland is just a town, Schenectady is an actual city. Stop snickering, it’s true.

And Schenectady’s restaurant week starts today, with 27 restaurants participating in this six-day extravaganza aimed at getting people to come to Schenectady and taste the good things they are cooking.

I wish I had great things to say about all the participants, but I really only found four notable menus from the bunch. That’s not to say the other 22 establishments won’t make you a fantastic dinner. They might. Their strengths could be in cooking and not menu writing. But I firmly believe that a menu is the window to the soul of a restaurant, and I have a stated prejudice for high quality seasonal ingredients.

This is especially treacherous when it comes to winter in upstate New York. But it’s not all bad. There is a lot of good. Here are a few things that I noticed:

Marinated Kobe Sliced Steak, vegetarian options, 12 year old balsamic, braised root vegetables, homemade bacon, roasted fingerling potatoes, extra virgin olive oil, Vietnamese warm rice pudding with coconut and black eyed peas, dried radishes, and mascarpone polenta.

What is perplexing is that many of these dishes and ingredients were on the same menu as the below list of things that shouldn’t be on a menu in February and other things that shouldn’t be on a menu at all:

Bruschetta, Beefsteak tomato, Caprese Salad, Skate wing, farmed Atlantic salmon, “to perfection,” coconut shrimp, strawberry shortcake, and roast asparagus.

So, the question you may have is where can you go to experience more of those good things and fewer of the shameful ones. It’s a difficult answer, based on the nature of fixed menus. Some of the best dishes existed on menus where you would have to suffer through uninspired entrées or lackluster desserts.

To me the best bet would be Appertivo Bistro. Both their warm fresh mozzarella and their mussel soup sound delicious, and mussels are a Seafood Watch best choice to boot. Each dish is appropriately warming for winter, deeply Italian, and relies on seasonally appropriate ingredients. The same goes for the entrées of rabe & sausage pizza and their gorgonzola rigatoni. For dessert there is a cranberry & almond apple crisp that may speak a bit more to fall, but if it’s warm with vanilla ice cream, I’m willing to cut them some slack.

The best deal by far is Pinahead Susan, where they really offer two four-course meals for a total of $20.11. Most likely the tilapia they serve is from China. But in the off chance it’s not, you can have an incredibly cheap meal of reasonably sustainable seafood.

Oddly, there were two different places that had menus based on the food of Louisiana. I suppose it’s not odd that Café Nola has fried green tomatoes, red beans and rice and beignets. But I did not expect the Ambition Café to have Oysters Rockefeller, catfish étoufée, and apple whiskey bread pudding. And while there is nothing inherently local or seasonal about these menus, I find them incredibly appealing.

Maybe it’s just that the deep and penetrating cold of winter makes me hunger for the some smoldering, simmered southern comfort. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t seen a lot of this kind of food in Albany or Troy. And while the Yelp folks clearly say that Café Nola isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, perhaps the good folks at Ambition will be able to pull it off. This is as good a chance as any to see what the small kitchen can do with a fixed menu.

I’m hoping next time around Angelo’s Tavolo presents the kind of menu that makes me swoon and gets me in the door. Oh, and if you want that Vietnamese pudding, you will need to give Cella Bistro a call. It’s a good-looking menu overall, but I just wasn’t feeling any of their entrées. Maybe you will go and prove me wrong.