Restaurant Week : DB Bistro

It’s restaurant “weeks”. For two weeks every January and two weeks every July, New York restaurants participate in “Restaurant Week”. For those weeks, restaurants offer a special tasting menu at discounted prices: about $25 for lunch and $30 for dinner. Last year, I took advantage of restaurant week by trying Bobby Flay’s restaurants Bolo and Mesa Grill, as well as Tocqueville (Jen’s favorite restaurant).

I think they tend to put less-popular dishes on the restaurant week menu, so I’ve always found it hard to not to order from the regular menu (which means I end up spending twice as much as expected).

Today, Jen and I had lunch at Daniel Boulud’s DB Bistro Moderne. They are famous for their $30 burger: ground sirloin stuffed with foie gras and truffles with tomato confit on a parmesan bun. Once again, was hard to stick to the discount menu, but we did.

The soup was about as good as potato leek soup could be. I liked the balance of potato / leek flavor, and I think they cheated by using cream in a cold soup, but it was smooth and rich. The salad was pretty classic, about what you’d expect. The tomato salad with the mahi mahi was awesome. So were the ravioli, which had some monster fava beans that were sweet and balanced out the short rib filling and buttery sauce.

Dessert was no big deal.

Next week: Scott Connant's Alto...