Applewood on 11th

Stew me. Roast me. Love me.

I'm sure everyblogger in Brooklyn has written about Applewood but that's not going to stop me. At the end of my run this evening I passed some friends at Applewood on 11th. They encouraged me to try it and since I was having dinner with my best friend, well, you get the picture.

I should start with the setting. The lights are low and its a bit too farmhouse for my taste but its a beautiful indoor space. We wrangled a table outside and watched the fireflies come out as the sun set (Ab and I have utterly Romantic dinners). I highly recommend the spot for a late supper in the summer and I bet indoors is wonderful in the dead of winter (when the whole farmhouse thing seems quaint).

We were a bit overwhelmed with the menu, it all looked so good. We were tempted by the tasting menu but our wallets kept us from it. $55 with a $25 wine pairing is a good deal but not on a Wednesday for a casual dinner. We finally made some choices. Ab had the parsley soup with lobster broth. It was good but a whole bowl seemed a bit much. It would be great as a cup served with lobster. I had the beet salad with pistachios, garlic scapes, and some creamy something. The scapes were savory while the rest of the salad tasted like itself. I would have liked the creamy stuff to be goat cheese flavored and I wasn't crazy about the pistachio (I know, crazy!). I think the pistachio was too salty and the creamy stuff too weak. But the salad was good and inspired me to try some scapes myself. Both dishes were good and gave me some ideas for my overgrown parsley.

The main courses were sweetbreads with apricot and goat with cannelloni beans. Ab's was a "small plate" while mine was an entree. At first the apricot was too sweet but it mellowed and really brought out the texture of the sweetbreads. The goat was divine. There were some rare pieces of fillet that I could have done without but the slow cooked portion that comprised the rest of the dish rivaled some of the great roadside goat that I've had in the Caribbean (shh don't tell my parents).

We ordered the chocolate-strawberry pudding with coriander cream and lime cream. It was good, the lime was a bit overpowering and the dish was too deconstructed for me. Ab loved the coriander cream but I didn't really get it.

For $40 a person, it was an incredible meal shared with a wonderful friend. They try to be local, biodynamic, organic, etc in their cooking and it shows.