arugula salad with strawberries, feta, and a honey-lemon vinaigrette.This was my favorite part of the meal. The arugula's bitter peppery-ness played well with the sweetness of the strawberries. Straightforward salty feta and this *delicious* vinaigrette. Shawn tells me he makes it by infusing lemon into some oil then mixing it with the vinegar and honey. His version is so well balanced, and I guess that's the key to vinaigrette.
Seared sea bass with a baba ghanoush crust and little slivers of pepper.Yum! This was a very generous piece of fish and Shawn seared it then baked it. The inside stayed so soft. You know how fish often flakes apart after you cook it? This one was so perfectly rare that the flaking was minimal. And the baba ghanoush was very tender and salty. I could taste the roasting as well as the earthiness of the eggplant. I wouldn't have thought to put it with sea bass, but it was nice. Shawn's restraint is evident in this dish: I would have been tempted to add citrus or something to offset the richness of the ghanoush. Shawn trusted the freshness of the fish to do this. He was right.
There was also a crème brûlée, but I forgot to take a picture of it. I wish I had, though, because I have a lot to say about this dessert. I'm a little exigent about desserts...only because I make them so often myself and don't usually prefer them to savory things. If I'm going to eat a dessert it had better be damn good. Shawn's crème brûlée is very good. I liked that the crust was nice and thin and crunchy (and didn't taste even the least metallic or butane-like). The flavor was nice, too -- though he claims there was lemongrass and ginger in it. I could only detect those flavors indistinctly and on the backend once it warmed up in my mouth. My only real complaint was the texture. Shawn added more egg yolk than a classic recipe would require. It made the color much richer and the crème thicker. -- Which was far from bad. It was lovely -- but less like a crème, which is distinct from gelatin-thickened desserts or flour-thickened puddings by it's delicateness. Like it's quivering between states. This one touched my tongue and got rolled around. My favorite crème brûlées melt there.
