After lunch, I was barely able to ambulate. My gout, it appeared, had worsened. So we hobbled back to the hotel and took a quick siesta.
Dinner was with my good friend, Danny, who, upon graduating from residency took a second residency here in OB/GYN. We met at Joe’s, a well-renowned seafood place. My travel-mate, Adrienne, wished to maintain the integrity of a Lenten Friday, so we made sure that we consumed only the flesh of the fish. Say that five times fast.
I have been using OpenTable for my recent trips. It’s an excellent app, and I know this sounds like a contrived advertisement, but I love the ability to pick and choose times. Prior customers rate the quality of their meals. In a city like Chicago, it’s often used so the ratings are usually accurate. In Fort Wayne, it’s seldom used so a single poor experience may constitute 33% of the ratings. I knew this place was going to be good when I tried to book a table 2 weeks in advance for 3 people and my options were 4:30pm or 8:30pm.
We started with a shrimp and scallop ceviche. A well-prepared ceviche is one of my most favorite dishes, it consists of a mixture of seafood and vegetables that are cured (not cooked) in a citrus bath. In most of my prior experiences, everything was chopped perfectly so you could only tell what color each cube was, not what it was – like a typical jar of salsa. Here, the scallops and shrimp were left in tact. The meat was perfectly cured. This process prevents overcooking, which is so easy with seafood, particularly when one is concerned about food-borne illnesses. The citrus was light and smooth, didn’t burn, it was just there like an island breeze.
The dinners are served (more or less) a la carte. Danny ordered a filet, I had seared Ahi Tuna, and Adrienne had giant crab cakes. I didn’t try the steak, but I have it on good word that it beat the snot out of Outback. The tuna was magnificent. It was a filet about 3.5″ thick that was smooth and cut like warm butter. It was prepared with skill: seared and rare on the inside. It was served atop a potato pancake and a layer of cooked spinach. The crab cakes were amazing. So often, crab cakes are a way of either dispensing unused crab meat or just menu fodder. When they’re menu fodder, they just have a few cakes in the back of the freezer from GFS and toss them in the fryer when an unsuspecting customer chooses wrong. This was completely different. It was as if someone genuinely cared about this dish. There was real crabmeat in the cakes, you couldn’t just taste it, you could see it! The meat had been forked into shreds and then an adhesive had been added (the cake part of it). This is the first crab cake I’ve ever had where the first ingredient on the list was crab.
We each ordered a side: Adrienne ordered the (this should be no surprise) mac and cheese, Danny the lemon steamed asparagus, and I the fried-then-broiled brussels sprouts. The mac was actually shells but the cheese was cheese. This was a rich dish but expertly executed. We were each allocated only a small amount and I left wishing I’d had more. The asparagus was partially peeled, which we agreed allowed the lemon to penetrate deeper. I have to say how impressed I was at how the asparagus was cooked. It was neither stringy nor soggy. I almost wonder if they have some secret alien-Monsanto version of asparagus that cooks well. The Brussels sprouts were halved, lightly fried, then broiled until they had a magnificent caramel and crispy texture.
Joe’s started almost a hundred years ago in Miami Beach, so picking the dessert was easy, also because it’s one of like two desserts I’ll actually eat: Key Lime pie. This piece was literally better than the piece I had in Key West. The whipped cream did not come from a can. It came from cream and appeared to be hand-whipped. I suppose there is only one thing that could possibly have made the pie any better, and that was if it were free, and it was! They were so nice about us being from out of town and so forth that we shared an amazing piece of Key Lime pie for free!
One of the things about this restaurant that impressed me the most was the level of service. For example, when we first opened the menus, Adrienne remarked “I know I’ll be ordering the mac and cheese!”. The waitress remarked about it later when she was ordering. But when the food came out, a different waiter for each side dish walked around the table and dished a scoop out for each of us, and the one made sure Adrienne got a little larger portion of the mac and cheese. Joe’s has a very rolling twenties atmosphere, and the service was a prime example.
After dinner, we went to an adult arcade. We did a brief round of indoor mini-golf, and we all discovered that apparently Adrienne is a skee-ball shark. A one point, she dropped 3x 10,000 pointers in-a-row. I would have done a lot better except for a little thing the Germans call ze gout.
We called it an early night because Danny had to work a 24hr shift starting early in the morning and because my foot was throbbing, so we made our way back to the hotel for the night.
There, we found a bowl of freshly made cheese-corn and caramel-corn, score!
Dining With Dr. Baltes 