Restaurant Week - Sauciety
Mar. 7th, 2007 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lillibetTonight we dined at Sauciety with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gilana and Becky E.
Sauciety is the restaurant at the Westin Waterfront, which is connected to the convention center, near the World Trade Center. The ceilings are high and the dining room got pretty noisy, but I was impressed that the sound was managed sufficiently well that other diners' noise stayed in the background and it was never difficult to hear the person across the table.
Their schtick is sauces. The bread (a mix of sweet bread with currants, flatbread and French slices) came with garlic olive oil, artichoke spread and roasted red pepper sauce. As starters we could choose either a salad (Boston bibb lettuce with watermelon radish, toasted seaweed and a champagne vinaigrette) or two skewers (chicken, steak, shrimp or vegetable) with romesco and chimichurri. For our mains, we could choose tuna, chicken or steak and then pick two sauces from the list of twenty and one of three side dishes (chanterelle risotto, white balsamic asparagus or sea salted fries). Three of us had the tuna with lobster vanilla foam (I thought it was not really foamy enough--J. suggested that they were just foaming it in), green peppercorn sauce with black trumpet mushrooms, lemon artichoke emulsion and avocado salsa fresca--if we had realized that sharing sauces would be so easy, we would have made a point of not overlapping our choices. J. took the steak with five chili mole and bearnaise. We all ordered either the risotto or the asparagus--the risotto was very tasty, but erred slightly in the gooey direction for my taste and while the asparagus was perfectly cooked, there was not much vinegar flavor. We enjoyed all of this with a bottle of Caymus Conundrum 2005--ordering it got me a very approving comment from our waiter and G. gave it the high praise of "not hating it".
The service was very pleasant, but a little flaky. The waiter didn't write down our order and we ended up with the wrong skewers (thereby scoring us an extra steak one) and the wrong sides (resulting in an extra risotto for the table), but the correct item was hastily brought to us, so it's hard to complain.
For dessert none of us could pass up the trio of creme brulee: vanilla, caramel and blueberry. We agreed that the vanilla was the best and that fresh blueberries might have been a mistake, since the skins tasted slightly burnt from the torch.
Given its location well off my beaten paths, I doubt that I'll make it back there, but especially for a large group to share all the sauces, I'd recommend it, if you're interested in the gimmick. For me it has a bit of the same problem as Fire & Ice--the reason I pay a restaurant's markup is for someone else to entertain me with flavor combinations, not to put them together myself. But it was all tasty and fun and the company was excellent!
gilana and Becky E. Sauciety is the restaurant at the Westin Waterfront, which is connected to the convention center, near the World Trade Center. The ceilings are high and the dining room got pretty noisy, but I was impressed that the sound was managed sufficiently well that other diners' noise stayed in the background and it was never difficult to hear the person across the table.
Their schtick is sauces. The bread (a mix of sweet bread with currants, flatbread and French slices) came with garlic olive oil, artichoke spread and roasted red pepper sauce. As starters we could choose either a salad (Boston bibb lettuce with watermelon radish, toasted seaweed and a champagne vinaigrette) or two skewers (chicken, steak, shrimp or vegetable) with romesco and chimichurri. For our mains, we could choose tuna, chicken or steak and then pick two sauces from the list of twenty and one of three side dishes (chanterelle risotto, white balsamic asparagus or sea salted fries). Three of us had the tuna with lobster vanilla foam (I thought it was not really foamy enough--J. suggested that they were just foaming it in), green peppercorn sauce with black trumpet mushrooms, lemon artichoke emulsion and avocado salsa fresca--if we had realized that sharing sauces would be so easy, we would have made a point of not overlapping our choices. J. took the steak with five chili mole and bearnaise. We all ordered either the risotto or the asparagus--the risotto was very tasty, but erred slightly in the gooey direction for my taste and while the asparagus was perfectly cooked, there was not much vinegar flavor. We enjoyed all of this with a bottle of Caymus Conundrum 2005--ordering it got me a very approving comment from our waiter and G. gave it the high praise of "not hating it".
The service was very pleasant, but a little flaky. The waiter didn't write down our order and we ended up with the wrong skewers (thereby scoring us an extra steak one) and the wrong sides (resulting in an extra risotto for the table), but the correct item was hastily brought to us, so it's hard to complain.
For dessert none of us could pass up the trio of creme brulee: vanilla, caramel and blueberry. We agreed that the vanilla was the best and that fresh blueberries might have been a mistake, since the skins tasted slightly burnt from the torch.
Given its location well off my beaten paths, I doubt that I'll make it back there, but especially for a large group to share all the sauces, I'd recommend it, if you're interested in the gimmick. For me it has a bit of the same problem as Fire & Ice--the reason I pay a restaurant's markup is for someone else to entertain me with flavor combinations, not to put them together myself. But it was all tasty and fun and the company was excellent!
