Tag Archive: restaurant reviews

  1. Soul de Cuba Doesn't Disappoint

    Leave a Comment

    The first time I went to Soul de Cuba was last year, for an end of semester dinner with a seminar I had been taking on Haiti. My professor ordered seemingly everything the menu had to offer, and the feast presented to us was both impressive and borderline excessive. I left feeling as if I were about to burst. My restaurant week prix fixe lunch last Friday was a much different affair — satisfying, but not so much that I felt liable to burst at the seams at any second. When eating at Soul de Cuba, take all things in moderation — except flavor.

    Heading to Soul De Cuba without making a lunchtime reservation was a mistake. We had to wait 15 minutes for a table, standing cramped between the bar and the refrigerator and awkwardly shuffling out of the way every time a waiter passed. Soul De Cuba is small, but if you have a seat it’s not so small that it feels confined — the tables are spaced just far enough apart to encourage intimate conversation. Lining the brightly painted walls are colorful, vivid Caribbean paintings and the interesting decorative choice of a flat-screen TV endlessly repeating a slideshow of old photos from Cuba. It’s a lively atmosphere.

    For a first course, try the yucca fries with chili and cheese, as I did. Yucca, a starchy root common in South America, has the satisfying softness of potato fries, but is richer and creamier. Topped with a thick chili and a bit of cheese, the dish is simply divine. Despite the symphony of flavors, I’m not sure how I feel about the plastic bowl it was served in. If one is paying that much for a lunch, there’s a certain expectation that everything will be served in washable, ceramic dishes.

    For the main course, I cannot recommend more highly the bistec uruguayo. It’s slightly unconventional, and I’ve never quite had a mélange of meats quite like it before: a flat steak covered with slices of baked ham and Swiss cheese, rolled into a log of meat that is subsequently breaded and fried. The meat was tender, juicy and very flavorful. My only qualm was that it was difficult to properly cut with a knife because of its highly elaborate structure, with rolls of beef that spiral around the ham and cheese. The cheese used had obviously been carefully selected — in dishes where melted cheese is only a garnish, restaurants sometimes skimp on quality, but Soul de Cuba does not. And as if the two large rolls of steak weren’t enough, the dish came with the traditional Cuban staples of rice and beans. Added to garnish were two slices of plantain, soft and cooked to sweet perfection.

    For dessert, try the flan Soul de Cuba. While some flans are light and airy, as though they’ve been made with skim milk, this flan tasted as though it had been made with heavy cream. The square of rich, thick cream was one of those desserts that you must stop talking, take a large spoonful, and close your eyes to really appreciate. Drizzled on top was a sweet caramel sauce — though not too sweet, it had a body and complexity that many caramel sauces lack.

    While I am not yet old enough to order alcohol, I spied a few people sitting at the bar sipping on what looked to be some delicious and carefully crafted cocktails. The beer fridge that we stood next to while waiting for a table also featured some quality imported beers — much more variety than you might find at your typical American joint.

    While I won’t say that Soul de Cuba wins the prize for my favorite New Haven eatery, I would definitely go there again with a friend. Fried rolls of steak interspersed with baked ham and melted Swiss cheese aren’t for everyone — but if you’re asking me? I say give it a try.

  2. A Formal Vacation to Roìa

    Leave a Comment

    According to Roìa’s website, the College St. restaurant takes its name from a river which crisscrosses the border between Southern France and Northern Italy. Roìa’s menu pays homage to cuisines of both regions, as the restaurant features everything from pasta to confit. All in all, there’s a little too much purple prose spent on the French Riveria, all of which ignores the fact that you will actually be eating in the gray Connecticut coast. Nevertheless, the food makes the affectations well worth it.

    While occasionally frustrating, Roìa’s fastidiousness serves a larger fantasy. The amazing restaurant like french restaurant vietnam aims to offer a specific kind of food, but also in a specific style. In this case, that means food from the South of France, and specifically old-fashioned food from that region. The menu has no foams, fusions or gastronomic flights of fancy. Instead, there are hearty soups, buttery entrees, and (if you want some, which you do) sides of pomme frites.

    Housed in the hundred-year-old former Taft Hotel, Roia’s white-painted and wood-finished dinning room serves that goal as it evokes a restrained, mannered decadence. This isn’t the South of France of racecars and Gucci bags; it’s the South of France of an earlier era, of the lost generation and Tender is the Night. I don’t know if any era is significantly less realistic and/or problematic to fantasize over, but Roìa makes its stake clear: Here, we want you to feel like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, not Selena Gomez in Monte Carlo.

    Last Friday, my friend and I tried out Roìa’s restaurant week lunch menu, which featured a choice of appetizer, entrée and desert for $18. Fair warning: on a typical lunch day, that $18 is only enough for one of the non-fancy meat entrées (you could get a burger, but no steak frites).

    The appetizers, vinaigrette of leeks with sieved egg and cream of mushroom soup, split the difference between experimentation and tradition respectively. Sieving an egg produces a collection of white and yellow granules, which the chef dusted across a leek poached to buttery translucence . My friend described the taste as “a bit different, but good,” which covers about all the adjectives you need.

    The soup, on the other hand, was both exactly as expected and entirely satisfying. It retained a satisfying mushroom flavor — the ingredients must have been fresh — while embracing a warm creaminess. Perfect for a cold day on the Monaco coast, or any day in Connecticut.

    Roìa offered up a sandwich of duck confit and gnocchi a la bolognese for main courses. The duck confit was where I expected the restaurant to swerve — confit is seen as a stodgy menu item today and restaurants typically “update” the French classic if they serve it — but the meal leaned old-fashioned yet again. The shredded duck came with tarragon mayo, surprisingly light for a dish that requires cooking with an immense amount of fat, but nonetheless successful. The only fault lay in the bread — toasted ciabatta — which was cut too thickly, and gave the sandwich a ratio of about three times as much bread as duck.

    Our other choice was gnocchi a la bolognese, or gnocchi in beef ragù. The gnocchi were cooked to perfection — slightly al dente, gummy when you bit into them, but never so much so that you had to exert effort as you chewed. And the ragù, creamier than your typical meat sauce, equaled the richness of the gnocchi without making the dish overly decadent.

    The restaurant week menu left us with the rather unexciting prospect of pear sorbet for dessert. The sorbet was light and sweet, an ephemeral endnote after a meal of heavy, creamy dishes, but I do wish that some of Roìa’s other dessert options (which include panna cotta and rice pudding) were on the literal and metaphorical table. I wanted to eat the desserts, yes, but I also wanted an excuse to stay in the restaurant, ignoring the time as I idly chatted with a good friend, before we had to go our separate ways in the gloomy November afternoon.

    Fitzgerald was right: If you spend too much time in the South of France, most other things, inevitably, disappoint.

  3. Not Constantinople, But Still Delicious

    Leave a Comment

    Although my grandfather likes to remind me at restaurants that you “can’t eat atmosphere,” Istanbul has a pretty good one. My lunchmate, Kellen, likened the decorations to those in his Russian grandmother’s apartment, a remarkably high compliment (although perhaps not the one Istanbul was going for given that it’s a Turkish restaurant.) Antique lamps and tapestries furnished the cozy space, and a warm greeting from the wait-staff made me feel like I was in someone else’s very welcoming home.

    A small loaf of bread lightly brushed with oil and sprinkled with sesame seeds started our series of plates. It was so warm and delicious that about half of it was gone before we received the accompanying dips. The Patllcan salata, otherwise known as babaganoush, was substantial enough to eat alone with a fork, which we did. It was creamy, and heavy on the garlic. The Nohut Ezme, otherwise dubbed hummus, boasted a lighter flavor and thinner consistency, which necessitated the bread as its vehicle. These two spreads were a nice introduction to the Turkish feast to follow, and also nice to keep at the table — their milder flavors provided a respite from the strong spices later in the meal.

    If you go to Istanbul, you have to order a limonata, or you risk losing the restaurant’s full, eccentric experience. I probably would never have ordered what the menu called “a Turkish style home made lemonade, made fresh by kneading a mixture of whole lemons and sugar until a sweet zesty paste is created, then thinning with cold water.” Fortunately, though, my lunchmate did. The drink tasted like tart, somewhat bitter lemonade, a perfect accompaniment to the richness of the appetizers.

    The sigara borek, up next, was bound to be good: a wonderful fried bread with cheese inside. The “layers of thin dough and stuffed with feta cheese, parsley and egg” delivered indeed. Although the feta rendered the appetizer a tad too salty, the limonata balanced out the almost briny aftertaste.

    The main event was the chicken kebab — these are the move. We received a plate of four different kebabs, called the Karisik Izgara Kebab, but the chicken kebabs were by far the best. Simply grilled, served with rice, they were light and filling. In fact, I wish that I had eaten a few less of these to save room for more baklava. But we’ll get to that.

    The other meats were well-spiced, and complimented by the raw vegetables alongside which they were served. The lamb kebab had the consistency of a meatball and was a bit too strong for my liking. But the variety of the plate would serve a group well, and made the kebabs perfect for sharing.

    And now to the baklava, which boasted layers upon layers of greatness. Not overly sweet, with a pleasant combination of textures from the nuts, syrup and phyllo, this was a winning way to round out the meal.

    Istanbul is definitely a great place to dine with a group. The small plates, meant to be shared, could even provide topics of conversation if you’re eating with people you don’t know! Trying not to butcher the pronunciation of menu items is a fun game, as is guessing what a “Künefe” is. Also, the owner, Murat Firidin, asked that I mention the live belly dancing shows that he hosts weekly. So, if the kebabs weren’t a good enough reason to go…