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tuftearsWe went to La Fondue for my birthday a few weeks ago! I've had chocolate fondue as a dessert before, but never the actual meal-type fondue, so I was curious how it would play.
I picked La Fondue because it came off slightly better than Melting Pot in the yelp reviews. It looks pretty presentable...
Inside, it seemed interesting enough. Eclectic choice of decoration. There just happened to be a geisha in this one corner, but a wide variety of furnishings around the restaurant; I couldn't pin any one theme on it.
We started off with a pretty substantial salad. I have a hunch it's meant to fill you up because there isn't actually a lot of food in the rest of the meal. :) It wasn't bad, the cheese had a nice strong flavor.
With six of us there, we could order two cheese fondues. I made a mistake here and ordered one cheddar fondue (basic) and one bacon cheddar fondue (savory). The two flavors were too similar; it would have been more interesting to choose different flavors. Oh well, live and learn! The cheese fondues were okay, but nothing super-exciting.
Above, you can see the two cooking methods we chose. One is a typical vegetable bouillion; the other is a grill. My relatives are way more comfortable with grilling food, I suspect. The meats were a basic assortment of chicken and beef and fish.
And here's the grill at work. After a bit of experimenting, we appear to have come to the consensus it makes more sense to cook in batches and then dish the food up. Food isn't cooked within seconds, as I had expected from my Asian hot pot experience; it takes minutes for the meat to be grilled or boiled. That makes fondue a very slow meal.
All that work... for a few itsy bitsy pieces of meat? Yeah.
I tried meat from both cooking methods. I think the grill tastes better, but as my brother put it, if we had wanted grilled meat cooked in front of us, we could have gone to Benihana's. Still, it was an interesting new thing to try.
And here we have chocolate fondue! This was easily the best part of the meal, and I must say that apple and grape go wonderfully with the dark chocolate fondue we had.
Sadly, while I was taking this picture, the flames went out so I missed my opportunity to toast a marshmallow over the flambe. D'oh!
Then, there's Tamarine: a Vietnamese restaurant that my aunts took us to the other week.
We began with an appetizer of "banh mi roti" -- wheat bread fried, served with a red curry sauce. Delicious! I could taste the calories. We kept the remainder of the sauce; it was too flavorful to send the leftover back, when we could use it to go with other dishes.
With five of us, we had plenty of dishes to choose from. Let's see what I can recall... Garlic fried rice, curried long beans, and clay pot cod for the first set. The clay pot cod was a real standout, sweet and soft and delicious. Aunt Margaret loved it so much she asked for the rest of the sauce so she could take it home to have with the leftover rice.
The second set of food features grilled coconut chicken, which was okay but not all that amazing; coconut rice and brown rice wrapped up in banana leaves, and 'shaking beef tenderloin', which was quite delicious.
There was no dessert menu offered at the restaurant, so we wound up cruising up and down the street, but my aunts didn't seem to like the looks of the bakery, so... While we were passing 'Rocket City Fizz', a pop and candy store, I recalled my co-worker had mentioned liking birch beer, a relative of root beer that wasn't as sweet. I tugged us in, curious to see if they had some. Yes, they did. Multiple versions, in fact!
So, we wound up having a birch beer tasting:
I think I liked the Reading Draft the most of the birch beers, but that said, I found it hard to tell the difference between these; they were all pretty similar, some being creamier/sweeter than others. Sioux City was notable for being an alarming red color.
I picked La Fondue because it came off slightly better than Melting Pot in the yelp reviews. It looks pretty presentable...
Inside, it seemed interesting enough. Eclectic choice of decoration. There just happened to be a geisha in this one corner, but a wide variety of furnishings around the restaurant; I couldn't pin any one theme on it.
We started off with a pretty substantial salad. I have a hunch it's meant to fill you up because there isn't actually a lot of food in the rest of the meal. :) It wasn't bad, the cheese had a nice strong flavor.
With six of us there, we could order two cheese fondues. I made a mistake here and ordered one cheddar fondue (basic) and one bacon cheddar fondue (savory). The two flavors were too similar; it would have been more interesting to choose different flavors. Oh well, live and learn! The cheese fondues were okay, but nothing super-exciting.
Above, you can see the two cooking methods we chose. One is a typical vegetable bouillion; the other is a grill. My relatives are way more comfortable with grilling food, I suspect. The meats were a basic assortment of chicken and beef and fish.
And here's the grill at work. After a bit of experimenting, we appear to have come to the consensus it makes more sense to cook in batches and then dish the food up. Food isn't cooked within seconds, as I had expected from my Asian hot pot experience; it takes minutes for the meat to be grilled or boiled. That makes fondue a very slow meal.
All that work... for a few itsy bitsy pieces of meat? Yeah.
I tried meat from both cooking methods. I think the grill tastes better, but as my brother put it, if we had wanted grilled meat cooked in front of us, we could have gone to Benihana's. Still, it was an interesting new thing to try.
And here we have chocolate fondue! This was easily the best part of the meal, and I must say that apple and grape go wonderfully with the dark chocolate fondue we had.
Sadly, while I was taking this picture, the flames went out so I missed my opportunity to toast a marshmallow over the flambe. D'oh!
Then, there's Tamarine: a Vietnamese restaurant that my aunts took us to the other week.
We began with an appetizer of "banh mi roti" -- wheat bread fried, served with a red curry sauce. Delicious! I could taste the calories. We kept the remainder of the sauce; it was too flavorful to send the leftover back, when we could use it to go with other dishes.
With five of us, we had plenty of dishes to choose from. Let's see what I can recall... Garlic fried rice, curried long beans, and clay pot cod for the first set. The clay pot cod was a real standout, sweet and soft and delicious. Aunt Margaret loved it so much she asked for the rest of the sauce so she could take it home to have with the leftover rice.
The second set of food features grilled coconut chicken, which was okay but not all that amazing; coconut rice and brown rice wrapped up in banana leaves, and 'shaking beef tenderloin', which was quite delicious.
There was no dessert menu offered at the restaurant, so we wound up cruising up and down the street, but my aunts didn't seem to like the looks of the bakery, so... While we were passing 'Rocket City Fizz', a pop and candy store, I recalled my co-worker had mentioned liking birch beer, a relative of root beer that wasn't as sweet. I tugged us in, curious to see if they had some. Yes, they did. Multiple versions, in fact!
So, we wound up having a birch beer tasting:
I think I liked the Reading Draft the most of the birch beers, but that said, I found it hard to tell the difference between these; they were all pretty similar, some being creamier/sweeter than others. Sioux City was notable for being an alarming red color.
