My Restaurant Week Experience

It’s Restaurant Week here in New York. As is pretty/sadly typical with me, I had no idea it was coming up until it was already here, which meant that I, of course, had no reservations at any of the fancy-schmance places offering a slightly more affordable taste of the good life. Luckily, my friend Kimberly’s friend double booked herself for Thursday night, and, even more luckily, Kimberly asked me to take her place. We went for a late dinner at Scandinavian restaurant Aquavit, where we tasted just about everything on the menu. While I stuck to the pre-fixe Restaurant Week menu Kimberly—very wisely as it turned out—ventured out on her own with great effect.

We started with butternut squash soup (for me) and mixed lettuce salad (for her). Both were hits. I love butternut squash soup, and Thursday night was cold enough to make it enjoyable on multiple levels. For the main course I ordered the salmon, which was perfectly fine but truly nothing special. I feel like I’ve had salmon prepared exactly the same way many times before. My dish did come with fingerling potatoes in a dill sauce, though, which I enjoyed very much. Aside from the occasional dill pickle, there isn’t a whole lot of dill in my life, and I’m not sure why. It has a great sharp flavor and really worked well with the salmon. Meanwhile, Kimberly was proving herself a genius by ordering the smorgasbord. A tasting plate of twelve Scandinavian favorites, she had three kinds of herring, three kinds of salmon, Swedish meatball (so not like Ikea’s!), a bit of pate, and a dollop of shrimp salad. She was even kind enough to give me bites of several.

Kimberly ordered the Arctic Circle, a frozen goat cheese parfait with passion fruit curd and blueberry sorbet. While I love goat cheese like nobody's business, I've never been a fan of sweetened cheeses: no cheesecakes, cheese danishes, etc. So I went for the carmelized rice pudding with orange ice cream. It was almost like a creme brule but with with rice pudding under the crunch instead of custard.

It's not a restaurant I could afford to eat at often, but even the non-Restaurant Week Aquavit menu was actually not that expensive for a special event outing. And I appreciated that there was no pretension; Aquavit wasn't "scene-y," which would have diminished my enjoyment a bit. I want the food at a good restaurant to win the day, not a see-and-be-seen ambiance. Overall, it was a great meal and experience. Yum.