Birthday Dinners 2013

Another birthday means I am getting another year older.  This year, I celebrated with my dear friends at three different restaurants.
We had heard a lot about Yours Truly and finally got a chance to try out their prix fixe menu.  We were presented with a menu of 8 ingredients to choose from.  $55 gets you 4 courses.  Between all of us, we were able to try all the dishes.

First up was beef and yam.  The beef was a tartar on a bed of sushi rice.  It wasn't anything out of the ordinary but it tasted pretty good.  The yam dish was a salad with yam and beets.

Then came a bunch of freebies including some oysters, a geoduck salad and mini sandwiches.

As we sat waiting in anticipation of our next course, they brought us a few more freebies - roasted carrots and cured duck meat.

Although we were happy with the free food, we were getting pretty hungry by this time and finally came the next course which consisted of egg and scallop.  The scallops were seared and served with some squid ink risotto.

The egg dish was quite interesting.  It was a poached egg covered with some sort of foam.  This tasted pretty good and was one of the more unique dishes of the night.

Then came some more waiting time at which point everyone got really hungry.  We also ordered the special of the night which was a lobster pasta.  Personally, I enjoyed this dish but we thought the $35 price tag was a rip considering the size of tiny portion.

Finally, the main dish was duck and squash.  The skin of the duck was nice and crispy, but the duck breast was too much on the rare side, so the middle part was a bit chewy.

For dessert, we got chocolate and "winter".  The dessert was decent, but didn't blow me away.

The overall feedback on Yours Truly is that it was a nice meal and $55 is pretty good for a four-course meal.  I wouldn't mind coming back to this place.

My second meal was at Campagnolo, which was one of the best new restaurants of 2011 according to enRoute magazine.  When we first walked in, we thought it would be a quiet night for the restaurant, but people kept rolling in.

We ordered a bunch of appies including a charcuterie plate and a fresh cheese with roasted grapes, YUM!

For mains, we had a lamb ragu pasta and an arctic char.  I really liked the house-made pasta.

For my last birthday meal, we went to a homestyle Italian place called Desserts Plus out in Woodbridge.  Their portions were huuuuge and the food was quite authentic.  The pizza made out of the wood-fired oven was delicious as well.  Nothing beats a nice hearty Italian meal shared family style.

Another birthday spent with lovely friends and delicious food.  Looking forward to an exciting new chapter in my life.