We had dinner with some good friends at Restaurant Eve in Alexandria, Virginia on Saturday night.  We chose to do the chef’s choice 9 course tasting menu.  Here are the 9+ dishes (there were some additions to the official 9 courses along the way):

We started with the sashimi of steelhead trout with caramelized shallot relish and truffle vinaigrette seen here:

This was followed by what the restaurant calls OOO, which stands for Osetra caviar, oysters, and onions in a puff pastry.

Next was poached Maine lobster with spring garlic cream, cumin-grapefruit relish and crisp shiitakes:

This was followed by pan roasted Dover sole with red pepper aioli and pearl onions.

Then we had pan fried veal sweetbreads with creamed spinach, Jerusalem artichokes and crisp Parmesan (I know that sweetbreads are supposed to be all sorts of yummy, but I just cannot eat them.  It’s kind of like rabbit–I just can’t wrap my brain around the fact that I would be eating Thumper.)  Those at the table who did eat them said they were quite good.

The meat course was antelope on a pine nut polenta cake:

The cheese course was blue cheese, which was enjoyed only by Jim.  The restaurant very graciously and kindly swapped out the rest of our barely touched blue cheese courses for a goat cheese course, which was enjoyed…only by Jim.

We had two pre-dessert courses–an ice cream sandwich made with gingersnaps and pumpkin ice cream and a smoked cinnamon yogurt with blood orange gelee, pepper cracklings, and mint ice cream.

The final course was a chocolate root beer float, consisting of a roll of chocolate cake, milk chocolate ice cream, vanilla mousse and root beer coulis:

My personal favorites were the sashimi of steelhead trout and the gingersnap ice cream sandwich.  Overall, we gave Restaurant Eve a B+.  The food was excellent and the service was superb.  There was just nothing that was knock your socks off impressive, although everything was delicious.