The Devil Burnt My Sandwich...

Devil's Den

1148 South 11th Street

Philadelphia, PA 19147

www.devilsdenphilly.com/ 

I had been keeping my eye on Devil's Den for quite a while before we actually had the chance to get over there. We took the opportunity of one of my fiance's friends coming into town to go over there for dinner and some drinks one evening. Its not overly far from where we live, so we walked over and grabbed some drinks and some grub. It was packed, as I expected it to be, but we were able to snag a table and immediately look at the menu. 

I love the beer selection and the vibe at Devil's Den. They always have a great rotation of beers on draft. On this particular evening, I grabbed a Southern Tier Old Man Winter. Southern Tier has delicious beers, and this was particularly welcoming on a cold fall evening. 

Unfortunately when we went, the food just didnt measure up to what I had hoped it be. The fries I had were delicious, but the panini I got was extremely overdone, to the point that it was hard to bite through. It also caused the sandwich to be very dried out. I also wish there was more filling inside the sandwich, but would have just been happy to have a not burnt sandwich. The ratio of bread to filling was not very good. I devoured the fries as I dipped them into the delicious sauce served with them. 

Two pints for Devil's Den. The beer list is excellent. Im going to give it another try sometime soon for the food, and I will definitely be back for the beer! The beer list is so good, I find it hard to believe that the entire menu is as poor as the meal we had when we were here. Its worth a visit for the beer alone, so give it a try and let me know what you think! Cheers!

Inconsistencies are Brutal...

Supper 

926 South Street

Philadelphia, PA 19147

www.supperphilly.com/ 

I have been here twice now and I've realized a few things about my meals here. Incosistencies are abundant. There are standout dishes, and there are not so good ones. The cocktails are all pretty good from my experience so far. We took my future mother in law here for brunch and I really enjoyed the place. I thought it would be a bit more full for brunch, but it was nice to have the ability to not have to shout to speak at each other. The service was pretty good. The food was delicious for the most part. The portions are enormous. My fiance and I split the bacon babka and the hoboken benny. I thought both were spot on. I really loved the hoboken benny. The use of the smoked mozzerella was delicious. I cant not love pork roll coming from Jersey. The flavor of the bacon babka was rich and incredibly balanced. It was salty and sweet, moist and flavorful. My only problem was the bottom was fairly burnt, so it made cutting and eating a bit of a challenge. I would go back just for the bacon babka alone. It was sinfully good. They had a pretty good bloody mary too. It was a great brunch experience, but our dinner the second time around didn’t fare so well.

There are so many things that I want to love about this place, but they never all seem to fall in line. I will definitely say I like it a lot more for brunch than I did when I went for dinner. There always seems to be great choices on the menu, but for me they just dont execute them the way I wish they would have. We had a gilt city gift certificate for the tasting menu, so we were able to choose one item from each from each area of the menu in addition to dessert. We started with a couple of cocktails, the Mad About Saffron and the and Brooklyn Roads. Both were awesome, the Mad About Saffron had gin, homemade apricot saffron ginger marmalade, fresh lemon juice, simple syrup, cider and the Brooklyn Roads had rye whiskey, maraschino liqueur, lillet and orange bitters. We were off to a good start, and we ordered the smoked wings, fried pickles, heirloom tomato gazpacho, heirloom tomato and watermelon salad, shrimp and grits and duck and waffles.

As the food starting coming out, things started to become hit or miss. Our service was great. He wasnt the most attentive guy I have ever had, but he was good. The wings and the pickles came out first. The wings failed miserably, but the fried pickles were decent. The wings were smoked nicely, but the glaze was really offputting. They were cloyingly sweet, and the sauce was too bitter. The touch of hot sauce on it was nice, but not nearly enough to jazz up the wings. I prefer fried pickle chips as opposed to spears, but these were actually really good. They came with a pimento cheese sauce underneath that was creamy and just enough spicy to round out the taste nicely. 

Next up were the gazpacho and the the salad both made with heirloom tomatoes, and both needed some improvements. The gazpacho was my preference of the two, even though the goat cheese flavor overpowered the delicate tomato flavor. The salad just wasnt very good. Everything was really bitter, and while the tomatoes were beautiful and delicious, everything just didnt seem to work together in the salad.

The main courses fared a little bit better. The shrimp and grits was flavorful and rich as I have come to know it to be. The sauce was sweet and spicy, very flavorful. The grits were a little clumpy, but overall not bad. The duck and waffles was both good and bad. The flavor of the duck confit was delicious. It was super tender and moist. I had to pull the rubbery exterior skin off though. I would have preferred it to be crispy, but maybe thats just me. The waffles were very good. They were savory, nothing like waffles you got for breakfast. I didnt get much sage though.

Dessert was a complete fail for me. The cobbler I had was so completely overpowered by the goat cheese ice cream that I could pretty much taste nothing else. It didn't complement the fruit well at all. The chocolate cookie plate my fiancé had was very lackluster as well.

Two and a half pints for Supper. I'll be back for brunch, but I'll go elsewhere for dinner. Like I said there is so many things I want to love about this place, but right now there are just better options out there in the city. Go for a drink or a boozy brunch and it'll be worth it. Cheers!

I'd Live in This Kitchen If I Could...

High Street on Market

308 Market Street 

Philadelphia, PA 19106

http://highstreetonmarket.com/ 

My fiancé and I had been frequenting High Street on Market for many weeks after it had opened. We were hooked on just about everything we tried there, and there was still so much more to go. My future mother in law came into town for a weekend, so we knew where we had to take her. It was our first adventure to High Street for dinner, and we were so incredibly excited to see how it measured up to the rest of the deliciousness we had experienced there. 

The menu is small, but its full of amazing options. It was really difficult to choose what to eat, but eventually we made our decisions. I started off with one of their bottled cocktails, a Rabbit Run, a scrumptious concoction containing carrot juice and vodka. Fantastic. We split a bread plate for the table, but once we received it, I wished we had ordered one each. The bread at High Street is serious. There is nowhere else in the city that does bread like this. Their pastries and breads are out of this world. The bread plate came with cherry wheat bread, ancient grain and the anadama and some pumpkin butter to spread on as well. It was seriously tasty. The bread is so good you don’t even need the butter, but trust me the butter is amazing too.

They had a special appetizer for the evening of fried razor clams served with a buttermilk habanero aioli. It was my first venture into the realm of razor clams, and it was a good one. The clams were fried to crispy perfection and I topped them off with a quick squeeze of fresh lemon juice. The aioli was rich and creamy as I expected it to be, but the habanero was definitely missing. I know the spice level is really high so you need to be careful, but I really couldn’t taste it at all. Other than that it was a great dish. We also ordered the mushrooms dish which came with sunchokes, smoky eggplant, kale and a soft cooked egg. The dish was earthy and hearty, which I really wasn’t expecting from a mushroom and kale dish. The egg yolk coated everything and brought all of the separate parts of the dish together as one. Again I could have eaten another three of these as well. 

For our mains, we decided to each order our own pastas each. I had heard so many things about the seaweed bucatini, I couldn’t resist ordering it. My fiancé ordered the eggpland and goat cheese agnolotti and her mother the crawfish and buckwheat orrechietti. We were all very happy with our own choices. I had the pleasure of tasting them all, and I was really blown away. The buckwheat orrechietti had a snap and texture to it that was just fantastic. The flavors of the crawish and okra went surprisingly well together and brought it all together. The most surprising of the pastas was the agnolotti stuffed with jerk spiced eggplant, and served with caramelized goat yogurt. The yogurt was tangy and cooled off the jerk spices really well. It wasn’t Italian pasta, and I loved that. It was so Greek, but had so many Italian qualities about it as well. So Unique. Finally, the seaweed bucatini was my favorite and I was so glad I ordered it. The pasta itself was black, served with a delicious seafoody broth and it was topped with tons of shaved lobster bottarga. Bottarga is salted and cured fish roe. It’s a very strong flavor, but its simply delicious and only nailed the seafood flavoring of this dish even more. It as salty and fishy, a true testament to the ocean. 

No meal with my fiancé and her mother is complete without a little something sweet. As good as the meal had been, we knew dessert would be just as good. The breakfast pastries we had there prior were so out of this world, we figured the dessert would be as well. We ordered the coffee crumb cake to share between the three of us, and an espresso for me as well. Its worth noting the coffee here is amazing as well. Rivals Bros provides the coffee and it is strong and delicious. The crumb cake was the perfect end to the meal. The cake itself was moist and the crumb topping was crunchy and sweet. The sour cream sauce underneath actually gave the dessert a bit of a savory touch to it. It was tangy and not so sweet, so it melded well with the coffee cake.

Four pints for High Street on Market. This place is incredible. I have been here so many times,  each time trying new things and I am blown away each and every time. Eli Kulp's cuisine is so inventive and unique. The bread and pastry program here is unmatched. All of the ingredients are fresh and local, and they are all stars in their  own right. It is good for any meal of the day. High Street has quickly become one of my favorites in this amazing food city. I visit it more than any other restaurant in the city. Check it out, as I am sure you will love it as much as I do! Cheers!

Expensive Mistake...

Thai Pepper

64 East Lancaster Avenue

Ardmore, PA 19003

www.mikadothaipepper.com/ 

I needed lunch once day while working in Ardmore, and I haven’t really been having my sushi fix since I left my old job, so I ventured out to a place I had been to once before called Mikado and Thai Pepper Cuisine. It is a combination restaurant of Japanese and other Asian cuisinses, with a sushi bar on one side, and a sit down Asian restaurant on the other. I was seated in the on the other side of the wall from the sushi bar, and I looked over the menu before making some delicious decisions about which sushi rolls I wanted. 

I got the flaming dragon roll which was a really cool presentation, because the sauce was flaming blue when it came out, but the sauce was really sweet and the sushi roll itself needed more punch. The flavor was definitely lacking and the freshness of the fish really wasn’t prevalent. I also ordered another roll that I cant really remember what it was called, but it had lobster tempura in it. Again it was decent, but for 15 bucks a roll, I was expecting a lot more. I am new to the area of Ardmore, but I suspect there are better sushi restaurants than this. There has to be a better priced option than 15 dollars per roll for lunch.

One pint for Thai Pepper Cuisine and Mikado. I thought the restaurant was simply ok. It was definitely very pricey for lunch. The sushi rolls really lacked some flavor. They were ok, but nothing to remember really. I don’t think I will be back anytime soon. I cant afford to spend $30 on lunch very often. Cheers!