Restaurants
Dining at the “Mouse House”
March 13, 2011 | 
Author I grew up visiting Disney World in Orlando, Florida. I lived in Virginia for over twenty years and every couple of years my parents would treat my younger sister and I to a trip to the “mouse house,” as my dad called it. You can imagine my excitement when I moved to California ten months ago and realized that I lived within a two hour drive of Disneyland! I don’t even have kids and I was dying to go!
My husband and I just got home from our first ever trip to Disneyland in Anaheim. We took our dogs to the farm, packed up all our gear, and drove down the I-5 to Anaheim. Now, I know what you are thinking… what are a grown man and woman doing going to Disneyland? Well first, we love all things related to Disney and second, they have some amazing restaurants there. Parents take your kids to Disneyland when they beg: alcohol and delicious dining await you!
So my husband and I have what we call the Disney diet which we developed over the course of our honeymoon in Disney World (I know, we are so sad.) It consists of one big meal plus turkey legs, ice cream, gummy bears, cotton candy, and pickles for snacks throughout the course of the day. On a side note, my husband managed to unintentionally lose five pounds eating the prescribed diet while on our honeymoon in December. Anyways, we decided to dine at the Wine Country Trattoria at Disney’s California Adventure while in Anaheim. I try to be the classy one in my marriage and this seemed like an “adults only” kind of place away from crying babies and tired kids. If you live in Southern California, if you are going to Disneyland, or if you are one of those Disney nerds with season passes, PLEASE make reservations to eat at this place. The food was delicious, they have beautiful al fresco dining, and they have a side patio with a wine bar!
The trattoria features twenty or thirty wines available by the glass and they have wine flights so that you can taste multiple wines over several courses. We each ordered a different glass of wine and the waiter was knowledgeable enough about the wine and menu to help us each pair a glass with our entrée. Now, we ate off of a prix fixe menu to get special tickets to the World of Color show that night. It should be noted that all of the dishes we ordered were also available on the main menu. It should also be noted that I was too lazy and too happy with my food to take pictures of all of my courses, I apologize in advance!
We ordered a salad as an appetizer. The salad had goat cheese (my favorite) with reconstituted figs, nuts, and herbs over a spring mix with some kind of fig-balsamic dressing. If you put goat cheese on a salad, it’s going to make me happy so I was very pleased. Also, I loved the dressing which was sweet and tangy all at the same time thanks to the fig flavor. I ordered the sustainable fish for my entrée. The fish of the day was halibut and I got a giant juicy piece with just the right amount of pesto on top. The chef served the halibut with a tomato ragu with cherry tomatoes, potatoes, and herbs. It was so good. The tomatoes were soft and tangy and just the perfect consistency, soft but still with texture, not mushy. The fish was cooked perfectly and the pesto provided a clean flavor to the dish without over powering the dish with herb and garlic flavors. The hubs ordered the New York Strip Steak with gorgonzola potatoes and green beans. The steak arrived medium rare, as ordered, and dripping with a delicious sauce. The green beans were crisp and the gorgonzola potatoes were amazing! The blue cheese did not over power the potatoes and provided that perfect salty, creamy, blue cheesy flavor.
As if we had not stuffed our faces enough, we got a dessert sampler to share. It came complete with tiramisu, vanilla panna cotta, some chocolate hazelnut creamy thing, and a strawberry crostata. The tiramisu was delicious and was my favorite of all of the desserts on the sampler. It was your standard tiramisu, well executed, and with a cute pistachio garnish. I ate the panna cotta but I wouldn’t order it if I went back there. The flavors were very boring in comparison to the other treats on the platter. The texture was silky and creamy but the vanilla flavor was overpowered by the berries on top. Not the worst thing I ever ate but definitely just average. I wish that I could describe the chocolate hazelnut lemon nugget that we had but I don’t even know what to call it. Kind of like a mix between a pudding and a chocolate with my favorite flavor combination, chocolate and hazelnut. In the middle there was a dab of something yummy and lemon flavored. Now, I know that you are thinking that chocolate, hazelnut, and lemon sound disgusting together but the lemon really makes the dessert more refreshing and less sugary sweet. Very pleasant combination. Finally, I tried the fruit crostata. It was miniature, it was strawberry, it was delicious but it wasn’t anything super creative or out of the box, just very well executed and rather tasty! The whole platter was whimsical and fun and you got to sample all of the desserts in the menu. It was a great final touch to the meal.
We ate outside on the terrace underneath the vines and amongst the flowers. I almost forgot we were at Disneyland because the restaurant was so quiet and charming. Our meal was very reasonably priced with generous portions, great service, and just downright delicious food. So the moral of my dining story is that next time your kids/spouse/whoever beg you to go to Disneyland, say yes because a wine country experience awaits you at California Adventure. I enjoyed my meal and I will definitely go back for seconds the next time I visit the “mouse house.”
Wine Country flowers
“This Is the Motor City”
I know you saw it. It’s the most talked-about Super Bowl ad here in Michigan and, I hope, around the rest of the country. On the surface it was an ad for a luxury car, though I couldn’t tell you — even after repeated viewings — which one.
But really, it wasn’t an ad trying to sell you a car (although I’m sure Chrysler would be thrilled if you bought one). No, at its heart this was an ad promoting Detroit … the maligned, beleaguered, down-on-its-luck city of Detroit.
Here, watch it with me again and then we’ll talk some more:
The narrator calls Detroit “a town that’s been to Hell ….” Yeah, that’s true.
I moved to one of its suburbs in 1978, the year the city was named the Murder Capital of the United States. There had been riots in 1967, with a mass exodus known as “white flight” soon thereafter. Some neighborhoods resemble war zones; I’ve personally walked through them, and recognized some of the skeletal remains of buildings shown in the ad. And each time a new administration has come in promising redemption, hope that something in the city might be salvaged has eventually vanished.
The last few years, in which the economy has been so dreadful, hit Michigan very hard; Detroit was dealt nearly unsurvivable blows. Businesses closed down, and General Motors even required a government bailout in order to survive. Unemployment in Detroit has officially been as high as 30%.
And yet … the complete line of narration in the video says that Detroit “is a town that’s been to Hell and back.” Those last two words are critical.
In the middle of the ad, shining in the midst of all the grit and grime and gloom that is admittedly a very real part of the city, you see the gleaming, golden Spirit of Detroit statue, with rays of light shining forth.
There is a definite resurgence in the city, a faith that Detroit has suffered enough and will regain its former glory. And to me, at least, is seems as though food is leading the way.
Slows Bar-B-Q — only 5 years old — has been named one of the country’s best barbecue spots by Bon Appetit and been featured on the Travel Channel‘s Man vs. Food. Its owner, Phil Cooley, is a tireless supporter of Detroit and has stated: “We need a strong urban core that’s going to attract people to stay and create.”
Avalon International Breads is a phenomenon with a small and immensely popular storefront in the heart of the city. The bakery (which is open, so that you can watch the staff at work creating treats like my personal favorite — the Dexter Davison Rye Bread) supports urban farming initiatives and buys local and organic foods to the greatest extent possible.
Then there is the Hockeytown Café, named “No. 2 Sports Bar in America” by ESPN2 … those are folks who know their stuff! And the Bucharest Grill is a destination for “hipsters and townies,” according to The Detroit News, despite not even having a sign out front to advertise its abundantly generous servings of traditional Romanian cuisine.
But there are also the long-time standbys — the ones who didn’t flee, the ones who’ve stood by the city that welcomed them.
There’s Xochimilco [so-shuh-MIL-koh], one of my favorite restaurants, offering some of the best authentic Mexican food there is. The Lafayette Coney Island, where I used to eat lunch with my friends each day when I spent a summer working in downtown Detroit, received a rave review from Roadfood.com. Greektown — a strip filled with fabulous restaurants and bakeries — was always a destination for Jeremy’s birthday when he was younger, after a trip to the Auto Show and a ride on the People Mover (an above-ground railway).
We are reminded that “It’s the hottest fires that make the strongest steel.” Detroit has been through the fire — figuratively and also literally. But the strength and resilience of its people are investing the city with a renewed energy and another chance at life.
Every day, there are people who sustain Detroit both with food and with “their hard work and conviction,” as the ad proudly proclaims. This is the spirit of Detroit.
This is the Motor City.
“floo·zie \ˈflü-zē\: a usually young woman of loose morals.” Thus a Food Floozie is not a woman who can be seduced by virtually any man, but rather a woman who can be seduced by virtually any food (other than sushi).
For more blathering about recipes, restaurants, beverages, ingredients, and anything else even tangentially related to food, please come visit me Monday through Friday at Food Floozie or check out my mostly-regular Tuesday posts on AnnArbor.com.
Posted in Blogging, Restaurants, Travel | 
Tags: Avalon, Chrysler, Detroit, Food Floozie, Hockeytown, Motor City, Restaurant, Slows Bar-B-Q, Super Bowl | 
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Foodnuts in Flanders
Last spring we traveled to Europe and went on a river cruise on the Rhine and Mosel Rivers. We started in Basal, Switzerland, and ended in Bruges, Belgium. We thought we’d share some of our food experiences from that trip, in no particular order. So, for our first post, we will showcase a dinner in Bruges. Belgians love to eat good food and there are places all over that serve spectacular food. It has been said that Belgium serves food of French quality in German quantities. Diners can expect high standards of ingredients and preparation but with a lack of pretentiousness of presentation. A number of traditional Belgian dishes use beer as an ingredient. For a rather small country, Belgium produces a huge number of beers in a wide range of different styles. It has more distinct types of beer than anywhere else in the world. You can drink different beers depending on whether you’re having fish/seafood, white meat/chicken, dark meat or dessert, much like you would choose different wines to complement a meal.
For our dinner in Bruges we ordered a typical Belgian dish, Flemish beef stew. Flemish beef stew is very similar to French boeuf bourguignon but uses beer instead of wine. The beer is representative of the region so the stew we had in Bruges was made with a dark beer from that area. Since there are so many different regional beers in Belgium, if you were to have Flemish beef stew in another area it would be prepared with that area’s typical beer and taste different from the one we had in Bruges. The restaurant is La Dentelliére. Their website is http://www.ladentelliere.be
Here is a picture of our dinner of Flemish beef stew.
Some diners had mussels.
And don’t forget dessert.
Here is a picture of typical Belgian waffles. They’re HUGE! No syrup. It’s whipped cream on top along with fruit or chocolate.
Top 5 Restaurants of 2010 – Reviews and inspiration on another year of eating
2010 was another great food year and for me personally it was an opportunity to eat all over at exciting restaurants old and new. Here is a quick peek back at some of my favorites and places I recommend if you are in town…
It was difficult to narrow a list to 5 when I took more than 24 trips and visited 50 (or more) restaurants. These places are geographically diverse, from the lower-east side of Manhattan, through Kentucky, up to Toronto and even out to the west coast.
Let’s get to it! You can find my reviews (if finished) by following a link in each title.
Bacon Maple Doughnut, I love you Portland
9 a.m., 42° and the best brunch you can have are these steamed and fried dumplings. Cilantro Soy Sauce and enough hot chili to warm the coldest fingers.
This one was featured on Food Network’s Triple-D, it is a funky place that has the best burgers period, and filet mignon chili. The drive out of town is worth it.
Otarian: “food fast, not fast food”
I attended a day-long conference in Manhattan Friday. I knew I didn’t want to eat the “boxed lunch” that would be provided so I checked out Happy Cow: Compassionate Eating Guide to see what vegan options may be nearby and found that Otarian was just a few blocks away.
I started following Otarian on Twitter and Facebook when they announced the opening of several NYC locations but somehow I have never had lunch there.
At noon I left the conference (after a highly entertaining keynote address from New York Times tech columnist David Pogue) to grab a quick lunch at Otarian on 8th Avenue.
I perused the menu.
Otarian offers lacto-ovo vegetarian options and vegan options (and some of the lacto-ovo options can be made vegan upon request.)
Did you know that in New York City chain restaurants are required to provide calorie information? I ordered the Indian Chutney burger and the Sweet Potato Chiplets anyway 
The burger was delicious. Spicy and hearty.
I’m a sucker for a sweet potato
and these did not disappoint.
For $10.83 I got the burger, fries and a bottle of water.
Does $11 for fast food seem steep to you? First, it’s Manhattan! Second, it’s vegan! Third, it’s food fast, not fast food
and worth every penny.
I will definitely eat at Otarian again.
Otarian
947 Eighth Ave
New York, NY 10019
and
154 Bleecker Street
New York, NY 10012
Originally posted on JL goes Vegan: Food & Fitness with a side of Kale. You can follow JL on Twitter and Facebook.
Posted in Restaurants, Travel | Tags: otarian, sweet potato fries, vegan fast food, veggie burger | 2 Comments »