I forgot to tell about our dinner we had on Valentine’s Day! Now, I’m not a super fan of this holiday. It’s not that I get hung up on the Hallmark thing, more that I just don’t feel like I need a specific day to tell people how I feel? It’s probably bad – I woke up to Bryan handing me a very sweet, heartfelt card (I bawled reading it), and I hadn’t even made his card yet!!
We decided to visit Fresh for Sunday’s dinner. We love this place and hadn’t been in a while. While their food is great and the staff is always friendly, I like that they approach their menu seasonally and pull from local sources. This doesn’t mean they are 100% seasonal or local – there’s plenty of mango and avocado to be found. It’s the way the menu feels out taste and ingredients from the season. Even their liquors, some of those are from Washington, Oregon or Idaho!
Dinner was a five-course meal. Wow! I haven’t ever had the luxury of dining like this. It was definitely more than we anticipated spending, which I won’t even go into; every bite was savory and we were there nearly 2 1/2 hours thoroughly enjoying ourselves. First plate was oysters (yes I ate two oysters), with a little ahi sitting atop mango and avocado that had a little sesame/soy type brittle.
Next up was a soup: delicata squash – puréed perfectly. I could have sipped on this for an hour. After the soup came a salad: fig, prosciutto and frisée … mmm! Next up was the entrée (can we get some more acute accent marks in here?), I took a photo with my phone after the waitress walked by hearing me ask Bryan “what do I do with THIS!?”. I was actually kind of amazed at all that sat before me, I didn’t know where to start. She smartly remarked, “well – first you take a photo of it with your phone, then you tweet about it and post it to Facebook to let ALL your friends know, and then you dig in.” I kind of laughed her off, like yeah right I’m going to promote your restaurant, but that’s kind of what this is all about – right?
Main course: lobster, steak wrapped in bacon, sweetbreads and veggies
This dish was over the top. Beautifully married flavors of steak wrapped in bacon with truffles, there’s a sweetbreads with foie gras fritter in the back/left corner, and then front & center we have this lobster sitting on top of tokyo turnips and colorful carrots. Just a dream to eat. I took this photo with my iPhone and had to touch it up i the Photoshop app so it’s kind of grainy, but the dish was one heavenly bite after another. Except – don’t tell anyone this – I had to pass the lobster to Bryan to finish. I’m not a lobster person!! It’s partly the texture and partly the taste. I tried, and I’m sorry.
After this dish I had to sit and digest awhile. I didn’t want to move on to dessert, it was such a nice flavor in my mouth I didn’t want to replace it with something else just yet. Even if that “something else” was a chocolate cake with passionfruit glaze, baby bananas coated in flambéed caramel and with some chocolate chile ice cream. Mouthful of a description but woah, what a topper to this dinner! Fresh Bistro I love you! And I love Bryan and I love my friends, my family, and just for a few hours on Sunday – I loved Valentine’s Day for giving me this excuse to dine on tasty foods and sip wine.
-xoxo-
