LUXE

I’m sure that when Chef Marlin Kaplin named his Detroit Avenue restaurant “Luxe,” he was getting at the connection between his food, and “luxurious.”  It is.  A transformed bank (the thick vault door remains, jutting out into the dining room), Luxe is open and lively, with retro touches, like the dishtowel-esque rough cloth napkins.

The mainstay menu consists of both classic and creative pizzas—from hand cut salami with fontina to chicken and waffles.  Or you could kill yourself with a luxuriously rich fettuccine carbonara.  I mean that both literally and in the best way possible.  Right now, Microsoft Word has a red line under carbonara, and when I right click it, the top suggestion is coronary.  Fitting perhaps, but totally worth it.  One of my favorite dishes at Luxe, it is always hard to top a silky smooth carbonara interspersed with smoky bits of pancetta and tangy julienned onion, and topped with a soft fried egg.

Every day, Kaplin creates a new set of main entrees.  I was fortunate to have gone on the evening that he chose to serve a pan seared Halibut that absolutely blew me away.  If there is one thing that Luxe seems to do perfectly, it is pan sear fish and seafood.  The Halibut had a perfect golden crust, perched atop the delicate white flesh that is so utterly…luxe.  The pan seared scallops from the small plates section of the menu tell the same story.  Perfectly sear on the outside, incredibly juicy and flavorful on the inside.

I would be perfectly content to end here, but I feel like that’s cheating—there has to be something to nitpick about right?  So here it is: the bread.  That’s right, Luxe starts your meal with focaccia and French bread accompanied by balsamic dipping oil.  Unfortunately, the quality of the bread is far under par to the rest of the food.  The focaccia is too dry, and the rather than a true baguette, the French bread feels and tastes like something bought in a grocery store with a rather underwhelming bakery.

But this is easily forgiven, because Luxe’s bread and butter happens to be just about everything else.

La Boca

We all know about Cleveland’s appearance on the national food scene with celebrity chefs, but what is there when you don’t feel like spending $30 on an entrée?  Delicious, ethnic inspired restaurants, like La Boca on Cleveland’s west side…that’s what!  The recently opened in the Gordon Square theater and arts district of Detroit Avenue, La Boca presents an upscale, contemporary, Argentinian inspired menu at affordable prices ($17 is the most you’ll pay for an entrée, with most under $14, even the the quality suggests that La Boca could get away with charging much more–but don’t tell them that!)

The first shot it fired at me, the Black Bean Soup (a favorite, our waiter informed me), was rich and thick, and bespoke Latin American comfort food all the way into my mouth.  There’s a slight kick from the jalapeno cream that tops the bowl of soup, although I would not have minded a bit punchier jalapeno flavor from it.

The chicken, spinach and Brie empanadas were the next item to catch my eye, though unfortunately they were the weak link in a fabulous meal.  The filling sounded enticing, but it really could have been shredded chicken with anything.  However, my entrée and the two entrées of my companions that I snuck food from were so delicious that I am willing to entirely forget the empanadas.  They were…grilled salmon with olives, tomatillos, and smoked paprika potatoes, pan-seared sea scallops with corn cakes, and spinach gnocchi with red pepper cream sauce, artichokes, and goat cheese.

The salmon was absolutely incredible.  Easily the second best salmon filet I have had this summer (Pier W still taking the number one spot).  I love the salmon and olives combination.  The saltiness of the olives provided a great counterpoint to the richness of almost buttery, perfectly cooked salmon, which was grilled with white wine.  The tomatillo as well, complimented the dish with its tangy, slight bitterness, and the whole thing was balanced by the earthy smokiness of the potatoes.  We have a winner.

The seared scallops just blew my mind.  I don’t order scallops that often, and these made me want to change that.  The scallops were delightfully tender, and the corn cakes and mango salsa added both texture and sweetness to the dish.  The gnocchi were delicious as well, though I would have put more of the emphasis on the gnocchi themselves by serving them with less of the red pepper cream sauce.  However, anyone with a craving for alfredo will not only be sated, but taken to a whole new level with a dish as rich as this.  The artichokes serve an important function here, cutting the richness of all that cream and goat cheese, but the latter is still somewhat overpowering.

Unfortunately I went after dark, and sat on the patio, so I don’t have any pictures to post.  But you definitely won’t regret it if you go to see the food firsthand.

L’Albatros

Of all the things I have been missing about Paris, food certainly tops the list.  So I was excited to check out L’Albatros, recently opened by Zack Bruell, in University Circle near Case Western Reserve University.  While I was slightly dissapointed by the lack of any sort of French feel to the atmosphere of the restaurant (although that has more to do with what i was hoping for than any failing on the part of L’Albatros), my lunch was wonderful, and the service was the most attentive of any restaurant I have been to yet.

Fresh bread (served continually every time our plates were empty–bonus points!), dipping oil, and a house made mustard kept us company until our appetizers and entreés arrived.   My arugula salad was ten thousand times better than the one I ordered at Bar Cento.  I ordered the grilled salmon, which  was beautifully seasoned and finished with a citrusy béarnaise sauce, but slightly undercooked to my liking.  Pier W still wins the salmon contest, but I’ll gladly eat from L’Albatros any day.  The salmon was served on a bed of lentils, which had a hint of sweetness that I wasn’t terribly thrilled with.  My companions ordered the chicken breast with fennel and goat cheese, the suasage platter, roasted trout, roasted cod, and duck confit.  The trout was phenomenal, as was the bit of sausage that I tried.  Positive reviews were given to all the dishes except for the cod.

Our waitress noticed that the cod was barely touched, and not only offered to bring any new item from the menu, but brought over the manager and took the dish off of the bill.  Having turned out lunch hour into deux heures, the other interns and I decided to skip desert and head back to the office, but I eagerly anticipate returning to L’Albatros and tasting their desert selections.

The Ultimate List

So here are the restaurants I have yet to visit (and really want to!) and the places I want to go back to.

New Visits:

L’Albatros

La Strada

Three Birds

Flying Fig

Sushi Rock

Crop

Hyde Park Steak House

Moxie

Ponte Vechio

Lucky’s Cafe

Ferris Steakhouse

Baricelli Inn

Table 45

Parallax

Brasa

Return Visits:

Lola

Lolita

Fire

Farenheit

XO

Red The Steakhouse

Blue Point

Pier W

Jac’s

Anatolia Cafe

Metropolitan Cafe

Unfortunately that’s well over $1000 of food, so I don’t think I’ll be able to hit them all over the summer.

Zócalo

The first time I went to Zócalo on East 4th Street I enjoyed my Chile Relleno/Enchilada combination plate.  After the bad taste my second trip left in my mouth I’m more inclined to say take your money and just go to Chipotle.  Seriously, I’m going to compare my burrito and side dishes to fast food.  Ready?  Here goes.

Let’s start with the burrito con pollo.  The char-grilled adobo chicken tasted burnt, and was nowhere near as tender or as well marinated as Chipotle’s offering.  Furthermore, the guacamole was atrocious.  It tasted like it had been sitting out for hours.  To be frank, I can make way better guacamole than what was served to me with my burrito at Zócalo.  And what I can make doesn’t even come close to the guacamole heaven available at your neighborhood friendly Chipotle.

Empanadas...yuck, yuck, yuck.

Moving on, the black beans were bland, (again, Chipotle wins the matchup here) and the pork in the empanadas tasted like they were ten days old.  And its not like I just drew the short straw from the kitchen…out of the four other people I ate lunch with not one was satisfied with what they had ordered.

So yeah, a supporting actor in the East 4th street renaissance loses out to fast food.  Zócalo needs to step it up in light of the other quality restaurants lining the sides of one of Cleveland’s premier foodie streets.

Pier W

Pier W might be worth it just for the view. The restaurant is built into the side of the rock face that forms the shore of Lake Eerie to the west of Edgewater Park. The dining area extends out over the water, like a pier. The northwest wall of windows offers fantastic, unobstructed views of the downtown skyline. Unfortunately the night I visited was classic Cleveland—grey, overcast, and, umm…grey. None of that mattered, because the food shone with a culinary brilliance to rival the most beautiful of summer evenings. Sometimes you go somewhere for the atmosphere, and sometimes for the food; Pier W is that rarity which outclasses every other seafood restaurant I have been to on both regards.

The inside is just as stunning as the view it offers, and follows a blue, white, and silver ocean theme. I am as much of a “designie” (did I really just say that?) as I am a foodie, and Pier W offers plenty of eye candy as well as palette candy.

The lobster bisque bordered on divine. Elegant, and rich, I only wish it had contained more and larger pieces of lobster. But I suppose I’m just being greedy. The grilled Norwegian Salmon, served with roasted fingerling potatoes and fresh spinach that not even a pre-teen could refuse, was hands down the best piece salmon I have ever eaten. Melt in your mouth is the only way to describe it. Pier W serves it medium, and medium is where you had better stay. It’s phenomenally perfect. Drizzled with a sharp citrus sauce, I spent every bite wishing that I had two stomachs, because I really wanted to eat two.

The sorbets were a perfect trio of tart and refreshing deserts to give a crisp finish to an incredibly rich meal. All made in house, mango was the smoothest and sweetest, followed by orange and then raspberry, which was the most tart of the three.

All in all, Pier W was one of the most pleasant restaurant experiences I have had in a long time, and I will certainly be going there again.

Lola

No tour through Cleveland’s gastronomic gems would be complete without visits to Iron Chef Michael Symon’s acclaimed flagship Lola (and sister bistro, Lolita–but that’s for next week).  Situated on a newly redesigned and bustling East 4^th Street, Lola is perhaps the most widely talked about restaurant in Northeast Ohio, and deservedly so.

The service is everything you would expect from a restaurant of this caliber; prompt, knowledgeable, and attentive, but at the same time friendly and gracious rather than cool and aloof.  Get ready for a big hit on your credit card though.  Lola is fantastic, and fantastic doesn’t come cheap.  Expect to spend upwards of $150 for three courses, drinks and tip for two people.

For starters, try the beef cheek pierogi ($12), which comes in a stacked presentation garnished with crème fraiche that provides a perfect counterpoint to the rich and tender beef.    The menu changes seasonally, but if you have the chance to order the Short Ribs ($28), don’t pass on it!  I have literally never had more tender beef in my life.  The Rib Eye ($34) came perfectly cooked with salsa verde, and the Scallops ($28) in a tangy myer lemon sauce, almost fall apart on your fork.  Desert at Lola is a real treat, and nobody should leave without trying the 6 A.M. Special, a playful take on breakfast with miniature French toast and maple-bacon ice cream.  Yes, that’s maple-bacon­ ice cream.  Trust me it just works.

The menu changes seasonally, but you really can’t go wrong with anything you order.  Check it out for yourself at www.lolabistro.com

La Gelateria

A small taste of Italy is tucked away in a shop on the hill of Coventry Road.  And even though La Gelateria lies just inside the borders of Cleveland Heights, you can close your eyes, roll the icy gelato on your tongue, and imagine you are in the heart of a bustling Rome.  With just shy of two dozen flavors to choose from, La Gelateria is the answer to the perennial “Honey Hut or Michell’s?” debate.

The atmosphere is plain; not in that modern, “less is more” sense,  just plain.  Not much decoration adorns the walls, and nothing about the La Gelateria screams trendy to you.  That’s because nobody comes here for the atmosphere.    It doesn’t matter what the walls, tables or chairs look like, what kind of music is playing, or even who else you might find here, because thats not why anyone comes.  They come because the gelato simply sings.  The fruit gelatos are crisp, slightly tart, and ravishingly refreshing.  Although you can’t go wrong with any, the pink grapefruit and raspberry stand apart.  The decadent dairy based gelatos, from Choco-Coco, to Donatella, to Almond, are rich and creamy, yet feel very light on your tongue at the same time.

Gelato leaves no thick, sticky-sweet feeling in your mouth the way traditional high-butterfat content ice cream does, but rather has a very clean finish.  That’s because gelato contains a fourth of the butterfat found in normal ice cream.  Deceivingly, it also contains a third less air (so proclaims a sign in the corner).  That’s true for both the fruit based gelatos (ven lighter than a sorbet), and the dairy based ones.  As such, you can combine to your hearts content, (La Gelateria let’s you make half and half orders) experimenting with the thousands of possible combinations.  My favorites so far: chocolate hazelnut and pink grapefruit, donatella and raspberry, almond and lemoncello.

Best of all, you can spend an evening in gelato heaven without spending all the cash in your wallet.  A small is $3.50 and a large is $4.50.  Even better, there’s no extra charge for splitting an order between two different flavors.

Bar Cento

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Bar Cento, originally conceived by Jonathan Sawyer who has since moved on to The Greenhouse Tavern, is proof that trendy doesn’t necessarily mean tasty.  Paired with the “Bier Market,” which serves outrageously priced, imported craft beers, Bar Cento is one of W. 25 Street’s much praised new redevelopments.  Obviously the praisers only drank there and didn’t eat anything.  The New York Times recently critiqued the city’s many upscale beer gardens for the drastic imbalance of quality between the beer they serve and their food.  I still have a bit of time to go before I hit 21, so I can’t speak to Bar Cento/Bier Market as far as the hops go, but I suspect that the NYT’s The Pour would have the same criticism–it’s certainly true for the food.

Yeah the photo is low quality--it's a metaphor for the food.

Just what’s so bad about it you might ask? Everything. Everything that is, besides the pizza, the grilled Ohio Beef Burger ($12), and the fries (fried in duck fat though, so have fun with that impending heart attack). Those are actually quite good, and I suppose that’s all most people care about at a bar. The Ohio Beef Burger is thick, juicy, and the Port Salut takes it to a whole new level.  It comes with delicious fries, presented in a stiff brown paper cone, with garlic cloves and rosemary. Add olives to the Salsiccia pizza–the saltiness balances perfectly with the sweet Italian sausage.  The Sunnyside pizza proves that everything is better with an egg, and also comes topped with pancetta and black pepper.

But that’s where the good ends and the bad begins.  The Arugula Salad was drenched in oil and salt.  Not a flavored, salad dressing type oil, just salty oil.  Much too salty.  When the lettuce on a salad is saltier and greasier than the french fries, someone in the kitchen has a problem.  On top of that, cured heirloom tomatoes and prima donna cheese accompanied the ruined arugula, both of which did the exact opposite of balancing the saltiness of the salad and just added to it.  I made the mistake of following the salad with the Brick Oven Chicken, which was hardly better (although at least it wasn’t salt cured).  The bone-in side of chicken was completely unremarkable.  It came in a dark red barbeque-ish sauce,with a few wilted sections of onion.  The chicken itself was practically tasteless, and the sauce wasn’t very good.

The Mascarpone Mousse tried to redeem the meal, and almost did, but just had too tough of a task before it.  Also worth trying is the goat cheese ice cream, which sounds odd, until you really think about it–just colder creamier cheesecake. Desert shouldn’t have to attempt to redeem a meal though, it should complement and finish the meal.  Bar Cento might be a great place to go for happy hour (and that is its main goal after all), but if you are looking for something more substantial, you’ll have more luck at some of the other 25th Street establishments.

Same deal with the chicken.

Johnny Mango

Johnny Mango World Café and Bar is a well known Ohio City hotspot.  Its friendly, inviting atmosphere is well complemented by an eclectic menu, and wide variety of juices, sodas, and soymilk/frozen yogurt shakes.  The atmosphere is casual and unpretentious, and the food is good.

You should definitely peruse the juice bar; the Main Squeeze (Apple, Lemon, Soda) is a great refresher for a hot summer day, or if you just worked out, go for J.C.’s Jump Up shake (Apple, Banana, Soymilk) with protein powder.

The #6 Nachos are a surprising appetizer–surprising in that they aren’t loaded with cheese.  If you can refrain from eating all of the sour cream, then go ahead and eat some tasty nachos before your meal without feeling too guilty.  And if you aren’t trying to watch your weight, or if you really just don’t care about your arteries, then you really don’t care that they are nachos, so go ahead and order them anyway.

I have had mixed experiences with the Pad Thai.  Once it came burned, and too salty, and the second time I tried it it was great (although not as good as the Pad Thai at Phnom Penh).  The menu isn’t extensive, but it is varied, from Jamacan Jerk Chicken, to Crab Cakes, to Miso soup.  However, I like to think of Johnny Mango as more of a quesadilla place.  If I really want  steak, I’ll go to a steakhouse like RED or XO.  If I want Asian cuisine, then I’ll head to an Asian restaurant.  But when I am at Johnny Mango, nothing appeals to me more than their unassuming, yet satisfying quesadilla.  Stay away form the burritos, not because there is anything inherently wrong with them, but because the quesadillas are just so much better.  Grilled Steak, Grilled Veggies, Grilled Chicken, Chorizo and Potato…they are all overstuffed with flavorful fillings, the right amount of cheddar and pepperjack cheese, and the tortilla is crispy like it should be…all for under $10.  Nobody likes a wimpy, soggy quesadilla, and thankfully that’s not what you get.  Unfortunately, the guacamole (ordered seperately) leaves a lot to be desired.

If you are really feeling like desert after Johnny Mango, you are pretty much out of luck for getting anything in-house.  They offer some varieties of ice cream, and one desert, the Chocolate Triple X.  Thankfully, Le Petite Triangle is right accross the street, with the best crepes in Cleveland.