Rover’s - a restaurant name that suggests a plethora of witty blog entry titles
Rover’s Restaurant has apparently been in Seattle since 1987. Somehow, I managed to miss it entirely until a few months ago. The place itself is an old, refurbished cottage tucked away from the main drag of Madison St. in Seattle (it’s relatively close to the Arboretum). The setting is very nice. I like a restaurant where you can’t hear the waiters yelling “CORNER!” every time they enter or exit the kitchen. That drives me crazy…it exposes too much of the guts of the restaurant, sort of like seeing the actors applying their makeup before they take the stage.
The food at Rover’s is incredibly good. The service is equally good. In fact, everything about this restaurant is amazing…including how much it all cost. But hey, I turn 30 in a few days, so my fiance and I decided to treat ourselves a bit…or a lot, as it turned out. The degustation details are below:
Food:
- Amuse Bouche of foie gras soup, roast duck with raisins and balsamic vinegar on a cracker
- Fennel salad with strips of cured tile bass and hot octopus
- Diver sea scallops in a carrot and celery broth
- Alaskan halibut with Washington asparagus
- Kumquat sorbet
- Guinea fowl with morels and spring onion in a lovage sauce
- Symphony of desserts: chamomile/lemongrass pannacotta with candied orange peel, profiterole with a little swan, miniature tiramisu
Wines:
- Glass of Pommery NV Brut Royale champagne (really nice stuff)
- Half-bottle of Domaine Lignier-Michelot Morey St. Denis (Burgundy) - apparently Neal Martin hated this wine, but I liked it quite a lot…how odd. It was a Pinot Noir that had some rose petal and other floral elements combined with a Grenache sensibility. I liked it, so there.
So there you have it! A lovely dinner that resulted in two extremely stuffed people. My fiance had a slightly different set of sauces and sides because of her food allergies (cream and pepper chief among them). For example, her dessert was a champagne and white peach soup. Wow. It was incredible!
So yes, if you live in Seattle and you have about $5000 burning a hole in your pocket, might I suggest the Grand Degustation Menu at Rover’s, accompanied with, of course, a bottle of Vosne-Romanée for $2500.
POSTSCRIPT: Let me just say that the combination of that Burgundy with the guinea fowl was unbelievably good. The fowl had a rooty, earthy brown gravy that the morels really livened up, and with a good Pinot Noir the whole thing was insanely delicious.