124 South 18th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
I am so incredibly sorry to all of my readers yet again for my hiatus from posting. Tax season really got the better of me again with my writing, but I will be back in full force now that I am past it. I can only hope that my readers are all still interested. Cheers!
Another of Stephen Starr’s restaurants had been on my top to try list since it opened a few months ago, and that restaurant was the Dandelion in Rittenhouse Square. My girlfriend and I hadn’t really planned our dinner one night and just decided to go out on Saturday to a restaurant without a reservation. Surprisingly. The wait was only 15 minutes for us, and we were seated upstairs in a room decorated much like an English style cottage. It had a really eclectic feel to it, yet it made me feel very at home.
We ordered our meals, the Cumberland sausages for me, steak and chips for my girlfriend, grilled salmon for her dad and baked trout for her mom. In the mean time we enjoyed a few beers and some bread while we waited for our food to come out. We had eaten a lot that day, so no appetizers, salads, or soups were necessary. The bread was of course just as fantastic as Parc; since both are Stephen Starr places I was not at all surprised. The beers were very delicious as well. They offer a few beers from casks, which are lowly carbonated like a Guinness and served room temperature instead of cold like most beers. We shared some laughs, and our drinks, passing them around the table for everyone to try.
When our plates came out I was so excited. It was hard for me to choose the fish and chips for dinner because I had seen them mentioned on the Food Network by Marc Summers as one of the best things he had ever eaten, but I love sausages and potatoes, and the onion gravy really made my choice a lot easier. It was not the most visually appealing dish on first site, but man was it tasty. The potatoes were creamy and rich. The onion gravy was flavorful, and salty in the best of ways. I mixed it in with each and every bit of the potatoes that I could. The sausages were magnificent. They had a crispy crust on the outside, and they were spiced and cooked perfectly on the inside. The fattiness of the sausages paired so incredibly well with the creaminess of the potatoes. I guess that’s why bangers and mash is such a popular dish in Britain.
I also had the pleasure of tasting my girlfriend’s steak, and boy was it amazing. It literally melted in my mouth, and the steak butter that it was prepared with was luscious. The “chips” that it was served with were super crunchy. They are triple fried, so you can just imagine exactly how crunchy they are.
The part of the meal that really blew me away was dessert. As if the meal wasn’t fantastic enough, we weren’t really looking forward to order dessert, but we decided that one dessert for the four of us would not be too much, so we ordered the toffee pudding with toffee-rum sauce and date ice cream. It was absolutely phenomenal. The pudding was warm and covered in the sticky toffee-rum sauce. The date ice cream was just the icing on the cake. It had a nice date flavor, but it wasn’t overpowered by the dates. I could have eaten many more plates of this pudding, and I wish I could figure out how to make it. It was better than any bread pudding or riff on a bread pudding that I have ever had.
The Dandelion was absolutely fantastic. The food was executed to perfection, the drink menu offers bountiful options, and the ambiance inside is quite fun. I cannot wait to make a return visit some day. Go out and try it because I know you will love it. Cheers!
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