Memorable Meal #4,773 Adolphos, Ocean City, Maryland
12 April 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Rabble! These Mongols wouldnt know good food if it sidled up next to them and bit them square on the arse! Might as well serve up a trough of beans and garnish it with a brace of dead dogs!
Basil Fawlty, Gourmet Night Fawlty Towers
A good meal can be a transcendental experience. Even better, you can learn from it. I recently picked up a few priceless tips of the food preparation trade that I was able to immediately incorporate into my own food prep repertoire; all as a direct result of a series of exquisite meals at a 1st class ocean-side restaurant. Adolphos is located within spitting distance of the municipal fishing pier that juts 200-yards out into the Atlantic and is just fifty yards from the seawall overlooking the turnaround where the Assawoman Bay connects to the Atlantic. Ten blocks from the 14th street marina, Adolphos is an Italian fish and shellfish Mecca. When Chef Dave strolled out from the back to check the water view we asked what was fresh and recommended. Grouper was his reply delivered with a wink and nod. It was akin to getting a hot tip on a horserace from a wired insider. We put our menus down and settled in with imported beer, Italian soda and Tiamo Rosso wine. We watched the Chris Crafts and Sea Rays chug west from the marina and make the long turn from the bay into the Atlantic.
The bread was fresh and fragrant and the table olive oil flavorful and expensive but not overpowering. Ms. Md. Jr. contented herself to mixing precise amounts of oil with parmagano reginano and dipping chunks of hard crust bread into the mortar-like mixture until the salads arrived. I love a good salad and hate a bad one: varied and balanced, I loved this symphonic salad concoction that came with a precise amount of oil and vinegar. Provided ahead of time, this was the only choice no blue cheese dressing, ranch or any other sacrilegious glop were to be found anywhere at Adolphos. Either eat it the way it was intended or dont eat it at all.
At Adolphos theyre not going to allow you to put mud flaps and hang fuzzy dice off the rearview mirror of the 1957 Ferrari Testa Rosa. The entries came and the grouper was a home run. Ive eaten a lot of seafood in my eating career (remind sometime to tell you about the humongous prawns and New Zealand mega-mussels I ate at a Sydney Australia fishmonger shop) but Chef Daves grouper was as good as any Ive ever eaten. On paper it seems a damned strange concoction but on the fork it was the equivalent of a Thelonious Monk piano solo: initially strange but as it progressed and unfolded you knew it was establishing a new benchmark. Imagine a delicate white fish fillet battered in a coating. Right there purists are wrinkling their noses but this worked; the coating was crispy yet delicate, crunchy yet subtle.
The fish was fresh and cooked correctly: not underdone or overdone with the sea taste intact. Often cooking coated fish overpowers that which is compartmentalizes and often with cheap cuts (fish-and-chips style) that is the precisely the goal. Overtop of his perfectly prepared fish Chef Dave laid an exquisite sauce. Mid-meal we were going into spasms of food-induced ecstasy. When he strolled out from the kitchen he looked at us with his Cheshire Cat-grin.
Food was shooting out of my mouth as I simultaneously tried to enunciate superlatives while still stuffing my face, an irresolvable conflict but apparently one he is used to. When purchasing your own fish obviously choose the freshest possible product. Thats the critical foundation: clear eyes and red gills, the whole fish should smell like the sea. Chef Dave concocted his crust using multiple carbonated beverages to construct a lighter-then-air batter. The subtle lemon sauce amplified rather than overwhelmed and pickled capers and lemon zest added a counterintuitive cut-back to the sweetness of the sauce. It was a perfect meal.
Now what does all this have to do with fitness? A lot actually.great restaurants and great dishes expertly prepared illuminate the dietary possibilities. Learn how to infuse low-fat high protein foods and fibrous carbohydrates with taste and dieting is no longer dieting. Ive said it before and Ill say it again, 500-calories are 500-calories and personally I will take a smaller volume of food that tastes superb over a larger quantity of plaintive boring food everyday of the week. Plain unimaginative food is the equivalent of prison gruel and eating swill is an exercise in willpower that eventually and inevitably ends in revulsion followed by binge. Open your eyes to the culinary possibilities.
Master Chefs like Dave at Adolphos widen our own food preparation horizons. Will you be able to duplicate Chef Daves lemon grouper? No way! Hes got thirty years of hardcore food preparation experience under his belt. But by aiming for the center of the target results exceed previous efforts. The next night we returned had fresh salmon. Grouper sold out inside two hours yesterday. He said when we requested more. I myself make salmon all the time since its cheaper than steak as of late. Chef Dave widened my own salmon cooking horizons by presenting the perfectly prepared fish with pesto sauce. Tasty and appropriate, the simple sauce amplified rather than drowned the flavor.
This culinary brain tickler caused me to consult Iron Chef Mario Battalis Simple Italian Cooking when I returned home. I now know how to make pesto sauce and my initial efforts will get nothing but better. Seek to stretch your own food preparation vistas and not only will you become leaner and more muscular but friends and neighbors will suddenly be coincidentally dropping by at dinner time. Next: purposefully primitive Weber grill techniques.
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