Small Plates, Big Array

But overall we had a swell time and had plenty of interesting things to eat and drink.

When I return a month later for dinner with Lee, my favorite vegetarian (she always manages to enjoy her food), I'm initially dismayed to see fewer choices that suit her than I remembered from my glance, last time, at the much longer dinner menu, three dozen items, rather than two dozen at lunch. We decide to order a salad and four of the five vegetable sides including roasted potato wedges, hold the ham. But when we ask our server if it is possible to serve the lobster apart from its bed of lemon-edamame risotto, he swiftly offers us a separate vegetarian menu, a new wrinkle, he tells us. From it we order vegetable lumpia — this time the house-made wrappers are faintly green with cilantro, filled with chunks of sweet potato, tofu, and julienned vegetables, but I find them even less flavorful than the crab-and-avocado version. The wild mushroom risotto, also from the vegetarian menu, is kind of clumpy, but full of good mushroom flavor. We enjoy the endive, frisée, and watercress salad, with sliced Gala apples, toasted Marcona almonds, and a creamy Gorgonzola dressing that I wish had more chunks of cheese.

Again my two favorite dishes are unexpected: a lovely and hefty multicolored heap of exquisite baby carrots lightly dressed with mint and honey, and a plate of chewy Savoy spinach, simply sautéed with lemon, garlic, and grapeseed oil, and garnished with a few bright red and orange cherry tomatoes. I am getting plenty to eat, so I am happy that the kitchen forgets to send out the pappardelle with broccoli rabe that we no longer want. I even take home about half of my surf 'n turf, a tasty assemblage of grilled rib-eye on horseradish mashed potatoes with wild mushrooms paired with two enormous panko-crusted prawns whose coating could have been crisper, but whose white meat couldn't have been any sweeter. Its lengthy menu description even manages to leave out a long strip of fresh ginger and two tiny rice rounds topped with spicy onion shreds.

I pack up the flesh in order to have room for an inexplicable chocolate dessert plate featuring a chestnut torte whose chestnut flavor is elusive, a Mexican chocolate "custard" that is more like a bundt cake, and a crunchy beggar's purse filled with a chocolate pudding that tastes much like the other two confections. But the rest of the evening has left us with a sweet taste in our mouths.