Restaurant Review: Moosewood, Ithaca, NY

Last Friday, Kimberly and I, after our lunch at Tim's Philly Steaks, picked Ian up after school and drove up to Ithaca, NY.  After five hours on the road, we arrived, just a tad late, for dinner with a large group of friends at the intergalactically famous Moosewood Restaurant.  

One of several Moosewood
cookbooks at Chez Brysmi.

While I've got absolutely nothing against vegetarian food, I haven't generally had good experiences at vegetarian restaurants.  I adore Indian vegetarian food, but for some reason American-style vegetarian restaurants have a sad habit of correlating meatlessness and flavorlessness.  There's simply no excuse for that.  For the most part, though, Moosewood doesn't take a "Vegetarian=Boring" approach to food, a fact that is equally apparent when eating there as it is when cooking from one of their many cookbooks, as we often do in the Bryant-Smith household.

By the time we arrived at Moosewood on Friday, the crowd we were dining with had already picked over several appetizers, which I'm sure were good, though I have no first-hand experience of that.  What we did get to experience were the bread baskets, with three different, hearty, fresh-baked breads, as well as salads and entrees that were all quite good.

Ian and I were seated together at one end of the long table, with Kimberly lost somewhere at the other end and, essentially, not dining with us, though she later told me that she had enjoyed a pasta dish with cauliflower and cheese, as well as the salad with the house dressing.  Ian and I were of the same mind, ordering the ginger-miso dressing on our salads and selecting an Indian potato wrap, essentially a samosa, with brown rice, dal, and chutney.

Ian isn't a big fan of green salads, but he enjoyed this one, with its Asian flavors.  When the potato wraps arrived, we puzzled over whether to treat them as sandwiches or as a meals to eat with knife and fork and ended up deciding that the rice, dal, and chutney made what would have normally been simple finger food into a full-fledged targets for cutlery.  While the wraps were not very highly spiced, they weren't bad, and the dal and chutney were nice additions to the plate.

Ian and I both enjoyed beverages from the Ithaca Brewing Company.  I had the Cascazilla, a wonderfully hoppy red ale, while Ian enjoyed the "under 21 option" of rootbeer.

While Moosewood isn't my favorite restaurant in the world, it does vegetarian food better than any other that I've visited, with a good mix of flavors and an emphasis on local, organic produce when it is available.  I expect that, should we be in Ithaca again in the future, we'll probably stop back in for another meal there, especially if we had cheesesteaks for lunch that same day.

A week with nothing on the menu

Why is it, Gentle Reader, that projects always seem to start out with a couple false starts while the rest of the world whizzes by? I started this blog with the intention of blogging about the food that I prepare for my family and my ongoing efforts to provide healthful, flavorful and earth-friendly meals. So, with my son spending the week in Virginia with his grandparents, what do my wife and I do? We either eat leftovers or eat out.

When I cook, I usually try to cook enough to have leftovers the next day. Frankly, a lot of the food tastes even better after having an extra day or so for the flavors to meld. This week, we had spaghetti with sauce that I made and froze when my niece was visiting two weeks ago. We also had a second round of the coconut-lentil soup that I mentioned in my last post. With a fresh batch of chapatis, it was wonderful.

Last night, on our way back from the shore, we stopped at one of our favorite places to eat on the drive home, Neelam, in Middletown, NJ. Previously, we've been to Neelam on Thursday nights, when they have their dinner buffet and everything has always been wonderful. Last night, we ordered from the regular menu. My wife ordered the lamb vindaloo and I had the vegetable thali. The vegetable thali came with papadum and soup as an appetiser. The main meal featured a thick, spicy lentil curry which I could have been happy with all by itself. Along with the dal were a saag paneer and a creamy mixed vegetable curry that had a hint of sweetness and was the perfect foil for the dal's heat. Naan and raita rounded out the meal and left me thinking about my long-standing joke that someday I want to move to India and become a real vegetarian. Though, in all honesty, I've got to admit to really enjoying the lamb that Kimberly traded me for samples of my dinner.

We planned on having dinner in NYC tonight, but our plans ended up changing at the last minute and we were faced with the prospect of Supper Without Ingredients at home. Instead, we chose to get dinner from A Taste of Greece, which is one of our standard answers to the question of what to eat when there's nothing in the house. As always, the food was fantastic. I've never had anything there that wasn't delicious (I love their french fries with lemon juice and oregano!!) and, tonight, Kimberly and I both opted for the lamb souvlaki. As always, it was delicious, though I was forced to pick on Kimberly just a bit for ordering lamb twice in two nights.