Clayton Restaurant Week(end)

This weekend was Clayton (small suburb in St Louis) Restaurant week, and we took full advantage of the 3-course pre fixe meals for $25 by going out Friday night as well as Saturday night too :-).  These restaurants are ones that we would typically not frequent as their menus are quite pricey, but restaurant week is the perfect excuse!! 
Friday night, Terry drove over to the city after work and we had dinner at Ruths Chris Steakhouse.  One word:  Breathtaking.  We got different appetizers, and go figure we ended up liking the other persons more than our own (I ordered the Louisiana Seafood Gumbo....it was a little too acidic for me, and he ordered the Steakhouse Salad.....he mis-read the choice and thought it was going to come out with steak on it.. HA) so we traded.  Ahhh the love.  For dinner, we both ordered the 6 oz. filet, he got garlic mashed potatoes while I got creamed spinach for a side dish...YUM!. Then dessert (we were stuffed at this point) was raspberry sorbet and a Chocolate cup filled with fresh berries and cream.  We had a bottle of Silver Oak Cabernet Sauvignon to accompany the meal, and even though we took half the bottle home with us, it was the perfect wine for a perfect meal.  We proceeded to drive home and go right to sleep with a food coma.  So delicious!

(I still laugh at this)

Saturday, we met up with Irma and Steve, who also work at Wash U., just in different departments than me.  We started the evening at Irma's with wine, shrimp cocktail, and cheese and crackers.  She opened a bottle of 1999 Navarro Zinfandel that she has been holding on to for forever but was starting to get worried it was past it's life-span.  It hadn't gone bad, but it was definitely at the end of it's life.  One of the sommeliers in Napa showed us a trick that if you helf a poured glass up to the light at a 45 degree angle, at the top of the wine, as it ages it starts to turn brown (oxidization), and when we did that with this wine, there was a distinct brown ring.  It tasted fine, it was definitely not a blow-your-mind 12-year old wine (I mean that in the least-snootiest way possible), but it was drinkable.  Terry enjoyed it a lot. 

We then headed off to a restaurant called Remy's Kitchen and Wine Bar.  The cool thing about the restaurant was that we could bring our own wine, and then we just had to pay a small corking fee for them to open the bottle, so we brought a bottle from Dutch Henry, which was from our trip to Napa two years ago.  It was phenomenal.  Terry tasted Rootbeer, but I got mostly raspberry and soil (earthy body to the wine). 

For appetizers, I got flash fried seafood (calamari, scallops, and shrimp), and Terry ordered stuffed grapevine leaves with lamb and rice.  I liked mine, but with his again, the acidity was getting to me. For main courses, I ordered the Grilled Canadian Salmon with soy, honey glaze, and ginger scallion aioli while Terry ordered the Grilled Beef Tenderloin with Triple Bleu cheese butter and Cabernet reduction.  It's so silly to say, but the green scallions are really what tied my dish together and made it perfect. Terry's first steak came out over-cooked, but the second was mouth-watering for him.    

 The absolute best part of the meal though was dessert.....and that is a huge statement because dessert usually never wins out for favorite plate.  It was this little bit of heaven.  Chocolate Napolean.  Cocoa phyllo crisps layered with chocolate mousse and served with espresso creme Anglaise.  Sinful.  I'm already trying to figure out when we can get back there for this little bit of heaven.

Fun times!