BITES

The Amateur Gourmet likes to call his random thoughts section "Nibbles". So I'll call my random thoughts section "Bites". THAT'S how creative I am. I haven't eaten out at many new places lately, though I have been to a number of places I hadn't visited in a while, so I thought I'd give you a quick update on my dining thoughts during the last week.

- Hey, have you guys noticed the cool new addition to my website? It's a meebo widget. It's right here, to the right. So basically it's this chat program, and when I'm shown as online, you can message me using the little window. And we can chat. Cool huh? We have Tom to thank for this fun new edition. Try it out.

- Now that restaurant week is over, I have rather unsuccessfully attempted to save money and eat in more. I think I've eaten in once during the last week. Which is the number of times I've gone to the gym. But I blame this on my friend Jess being in town. It's just hard to eat in when you have house guests. Speaking of house guests, I also have a new addition to my apartment, the mouse. He runs around in my room late at night, scurrying around, finding caches of chocolate that I've long forgotten about and generally keeping me awake. Hopefully my building maintenance ppl will actually do something about it and soon. Otherwise I'll be borrowing my friends' cats.

- I went to Wilson's again this weekend. I love that place. I saw cherries and they were $5/lb. But I decided this would be my last cherry purchase until next year. So I splurged, and spent $13 on a bag of cherries. Yeah, it's a lot. But not as much as the $25 that I spent on a bag at Whole Foods last year. Sigh. I love cherries.

- And speaking of Wilson's, I also bought these fantastic golden cherry tomatoes. They're so much sweeter than regular cherry tomatoes. I bought two baskets for Tom, but ended eating one myself. I haven't bought any heirloom tomatoes yet, even though I know it's prime heirloom tomato time and all anyone can talk about is heirlooms. I wasn't excited about the ones I saw at the South End Open Market and the ones at Wilson's were kinda big. (Leah bought an enormous man-tomato), but I'm gonna pick some up tomorrow at the Brookline Farmer's Market.

- We tried out brunch at Toro last Sunday, and I would advise you guys to pass. Toro is much better for dinner. They had far fewer tapas on the menu than I expected. We did get some great potatoes and crepes, but the egg dishes were generally disappointing, and pretty pricey. Both Jess and Leah got the scrambled eggs with avocado and aspargus, but they arrived without avocado. I guess they ran out and forgot to mention it, so that was disappointing. My huevos rancheros weren't so great either. Though I did enjoy the flavorful salsa, there were far too many beans and not much of anything else. And $12 was a lot for the size. Next time, I'll visit my other favorite South End breakfast places, like Metropolis.

- Don't ask for wine recommendations at Petit Robert. It's been months since I've eaten at Petit Robert. Oh, and did you know they've already opened a second location in the South End? Anyway, I digress. We went there for dinner a few nights ago for Jess's last night here. And it was a pretty decent meal. Jess enjoyed it and that's what's important. I like it when you can get 3 courses for dinner and still pay under $35 for good food. However, I was very annoyed at our waiter. Jess wanted to order wine with dinner and asked for a glass of Riesling (which they didn't have. Oh, and she picked up the Riesling habit from me, since it's one of my favorite wines). I realize that Jess truly enjoyes Riesling cause it's a sweeter wine (but that's offset by the acidity of the wine, so it complements food well), so she asked the waiter if there is another wine that he can recommend that is also sweet? And what does he do, but takes out the DESSERT MENU and starts to recommend a muscat and then a banyuls to her. I nearly flipped. I hated the waiter's assumption that since we looked younger and were dressed casually that we'd have no knowledge of wine. And if he lacked the knowledge to recommend a good wine, he should've admitted it, and looked to someone else for help. I scanned the wine menu and realized there probably wasn't anything on there that Jess would've liked, so she ended up not ordering a wine. But it would've been worse had she ordered a muscat to go with her skirt steak. Yikes.

- A French macaroon does have meringue in it. Don't question the pastry cook that used to pipe out 400 of these things every few days for a petit four plate. Actually, all macarroons have meringue in it. Even those coconut ones. Yeah, I've spent many an hour rolling hundreds of those too.

and that's all folks!