Restaurant Week Experience

We ended up going to two "official" restaurant week places. The first was Charles City Tavern with friends.

An old farmhouse tucked away along Route 5. Complete with porch and friendly kitty (had to pay a belly rub toll to enter).

The butternut squash soup was fantastic and suited the region's return to Autumn.

The crabcakes (sitting atop corn and ham saute) were almost pure lumpmeat crab. Very nice. The corn was yellow and out of a can.

The wine list was short and short on bottles under $50. In fact, one of the under $50 bottles was sold out. While we had nice-tasting bottles, it was tough to pay the equivalent of two meals for a bottle of wine. Because of the wine expense, we will probably not make a point of returning to Charles City Tavern on a frequent basis.

On the final night of restaurant week we popped into Water Grill for a drink at the bar and ended up staying for dinner.

Wine choices were more varied and more reasonable. We had a very nice Hendry Cabernet.

For apps, we had fried oysters and the lobster and shrimp pot stickers. Hubby loved the oysters. The pot stickers were extremely disappointing. Gummy and not a lot of flavor. The soy sauce that accompanied them killed whatever flavor was present. Another sauce that complimented the dish needed to be presented. I would not order these again.

For entrees we had a tenderloin with whipped potatoes (for me) and crabcakes  with whipped potatoes (for hubby). He really liked the crabcakes (I liked Charles City Tavern's better). My beef was most excellent. Tender and tasty. The potatoes were dry and tasteless, unfortunately.

Good for the restaurants for supporting the Central Virginia Food Bank. I was disappointed in all of the controversy over who was "allowed" to participate (as if no other restaurant could donate to a worthy cause). Once again, I prefer to make my own donation and eat where I want.

One last question - why was restaurant week held at this particular time? Wouldn't it be better to hold it in the dead of winter when restaurants are traditionally slow? We didn't even bother to eat at Acacia's because we knew it would be zoo-like.

And a final shout-out to RVA News for keeping everyone up to date on the restaurant line-ups and their menus. You guys rock!