Remy's Anniversary Dinner

Unfortunately, Remy's has closed.

Since we were staying close by, I thought we'd try out Remy's for dinner as it was within walking distance. I had only been there once before for a "wine dinner", and Patience had never been before. It's a good thing we headed out early because the place was booked solid. If you want to go on a Friday or Saturday night, be sure to make a reservation!!

We were lucky that there was some space at the bar for us, especially since the restaurant is somewhat small. Although, we do enjoy sitting at the bar to watch all the cocktail shaking and other excitement that goes on behind the bar.

While we waited on our meal, they started us off with olive pate with crostinis. I prefer to eat the stuff with a spoon directly, but we did act civilized and spread it on the toasted bread. I'm pretty sure I hogged most of it though.

Olive Pate with Crostinis

We never made it to the large plates on the menu because our favorites fell into the small plates category: scallops and mussels!

Pan Seared Scallops & Spinach with tomato balsamic vinaigrette and crumbled goat cheese.

Scallops

Steamed PEI Mussels with fresh herbs, garlic, white wine, butter and broth served with a grilled baguette.

Mussels

By going with small plates, then meant there was room for a cheese plate! Camembert, Smoked Gouda, and Morbier!

Cheese Plate 

Here were the choices... it was hard to pick!

Cheese list

And of course Patience makes it hard to say no to dessert. We each got our own because I wanted the chocolate and she got her creme brulee.

Check THIS out... the tower of chocolatey goodness is Chocolate Napoleon! Cocoa phyllo crisps layered with chocolate mousse served with espresso creme anglaise. Below that is the Tahitian Vanilla Creme Brulee.

Chocolate Napoleon

Tahitian Vanilla Creme Brulee

For Clayton, this restaurant is reasonably priced and small enough to have plenty of romance and charm.

Resources:

Remy's Kitchen & Wine Bar = http://www.remyskitchen.com/

Photos by Patience Scanlon

PW Pizza Left Hand Beer Dinner

We kicked the year off right with PW Pizza's Left Hand Brewing Beer Dinner, and most people know them for their Milk Stout Nitro. The Nitro was part of the dessert course, well paired with a Chocolate Fudge Brownie!

Chocolate Fudge Brownie

The other highlight of this dinner is that we probably had one of THE BEST pizzas ever for the 3rd course: Roasted Poblano Prime Rib Pizza with Provolone Cheese, Caramelized Onions, and Porcini Mushroom Cream Sauce.

We made a lot of noise about how it should be on the main menu, although I'm sure throwing prime rib on a menu would be pricey!

Roasted Poblano Prime Rib Pizza

This pizza was not spicy at all and it really tasted a lot like a Philly Cheesesteak on a pizza! This was paired with the Black Jack Porter, a big beer coming in at the highest ABV of the night at 6.8%.

Jumping back to the start of the night, we kicked off with a Kale & Bacon Salad paired with the Sawtooth Ale. Easy to drink! (And you know I picked off all the bacon.)

Kale & Bacon Salad

As per usual, the Introvert IPA was my least favorite beer, but the pizza paired with it was still delicious. The Chicken & Spinach Pizza was on (my favorite) Honey Wheat Crust with goat cheese, green apple, and spiced pecans with a balsamic glaze.

Chicken & Spinach Pizza

Menu

Now there won't be a February beer dinner due to the Centennial Beer Festival that Moulin Events hosts every year.

Tickets are still available at http://centennialbeerfestival.com/

Resources:

PW Pizza = http://pwpizza.com/

Left Hand Brewing = http://lefthandbrewing.com/

Photos by Patience Scanlon

Nami Ramen

Unfortunately, Patience was feeling under the weather and all she wanted to eat was soup. Luckily, Nami Ramen just opened up in Clayton, which is about five minutes away!

Downtown Clayton is nice and quiet in the evenings so it was easy to sneak in before the dinner rush. There are not too many tables, but there are quite a few seats along the windows and at the bar in addition to a couple of communal tables.

Communal Tables

Important note: When you walk in the doors, turn right! This is very important so that the first thing you'll see is the menu, whereas if you do what we did, you'll look around the dining room completely lost.

Menu board and cashier

While I was a bit overwhelmed by the menu at Robata (they have sushi AND ramen AND you have to pick the style and you don't know what is what), I found that the menu at Nami was a lot easier to read through.

There are a lot of pork options so that really helped to narrow down my choice even more.

We started off with some edamame...

Edamame

I chose the Seafood Ramen, which came with huge chunks of shrimp tempura. Each tray comes with a soup spoon and chopsticks.

Seafood Ramen

And Patience ordered the Show Me, Shoyu Ramen, which is ramen with pork shoulder.

Show Me, Shoyu Ramen

Check out the giant seaweed paper decorating the bowl! Once it melted a little bit, I stirred it into my soup. Of course we both took half our soup home because of the generous portions.

Not as cramped as Robata... I can't wait to try more Ramen!

Resources:

Nami Ramen = http://namiramen.com/

Photos by Patience Scanlon

Byrd & Barrel

Since my birthday fell on the holy day of football, Patience was sweet enough to run out to Byrd & Barrel to pick up my birthday dinner. We are slowly catching up to all the fried chicken places and I had heard that this one was "fast casual" so it worked out well between football and going to a movie.

I didn't know much about this place other than it had a drive-thru and "nugz" for the kids. Since we wanted to try as many things as possible, we ordered a bit too much, but we really didn't mind leftovers.

I knew I wanted to order half a bird so that Patience could have her thigh and I could have my leg and breast. (And I got the wing.)

Half Byrd

The Nugz are really where it's at...all the taste of fried chicken with less mess! Plus you can order them white or dark. We got one of each so we could both have our own favorites.

Nugz

And of course we got our favorite sides: mac and cheese and cornbread. We had to get our own mac and cheese since they were small portions, but the cornbread was the size of my head!

Mac & Cheese

Cornbread

 It all looked so pretty on my plate...don't worry... I didn't eat it all...OK...most of it!

Full plate!

If you want to see prettier pictures, check out Whiskey & Soba's blog about it!

Resources:

Byrd & Barrel = http://byrdandbarrel.com/

Photos by Patience Scanlon

Tenderloin Room

Even though it's one of my parent's top restaurants, I had never been to the Tenderloin Room. Yet, I had just been in the Chase Park Plaza the night before to see a movie.

The hotel restaurant is quite fancy and there is definitely top-level service, which is nice to experience once a year or so.

Of course there is a lengthy list of steaks, given the name of the restaurant, and my Dad got his favorite, liver and onions. But Patience, Linda and I all ordered fish.

The raw bar wheeled to our table was incredibly tempting...shrimp cocktail, oysters on the half shell... but we were well-behaved since we knew dessert was in our future.

We started off with salads and I was really pleased that they had one with a lot of goodies on it: tomatoes, feta cheese, kalata olives, and hearts of palm.

Country Salad

Patience's Spinach salad also had its share of goodies...mushrooms, eggs, hearts of palm, and parmesan cheese!!

Spinach Salad

The rest of us ordered the fish special, the grouper, which came with the biggest stalks of broccoli ever!

Grouper with broccoli

Skipping the raw bar paid off in the end since in addition to the complimentary chocolate dessert, it turned out our server was quite skilled at making Bananas Foster table-side, so we wanted to see the show up close!

Bananas Foster

Chocolate Cake

The fire for the chocolate cake is not quite as exciting, but definitely my preference.

This is a good spot to take your parents for a special evening.

Resources:

Tenderloin Room = http://www.tenderloinroom.com/

Photos by Patience Scanlon