Thursday, October 23, 2008

Dinner at Oyamel


We stopped in for dinner at Oyamel downtown after David's trip to NY, where he ate nothing memorable. The verdict on Oyamel: mixed. Some of the dishes were intriguing and delicious, but too many were bland. The delicious choices included the taco with pork (but not a beef one billed as a special) -- both were exceedingly tiny by the way. The mole poblano sauce on the chicken was exceptional. The red snapper ceviche was great. The sopas under a pile of shredded pork were outstanding -- crisp and tasty. Too bad the pork itself was extremely bland. We had different opinions on the fruit "gazpacho" -- Michael thought it was light and delicious, David thought it resembled the fruit buffet at a chain hotel, with a little chili dusting added (which was, admittedly, quite nice). With a dish this simple, the ingredients have to be absolutely first rate and perfectly ripe and these, we agreed, were not. We also split on the seared scallops. David, who loves scallops, thought they were excellent although the sauce was hard to detect. Michael, who doesn't, though they were undercooked. Most of the rest of the stuff we had was not memorable -- we guess the ratio was 60% delicious to 40% disappointing, which is a bit lower than we'd like. We had one margarita each -- delicious, but expensive at $9.50 in a deceptive small glass (one of those highball glasses with the extra-fat bottom to make the glass look bigger than it is...shame on you, Oyamel). The total bill was very reasonable at about $85 before tip. We agreed that it would be more fun with a larger group because of the small plates concept. However, most of the plates were too small to share among more than two people.

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