My good friend K. found this ad in the City Paper… “Sexy Mexican vixen seeking big strong man to stuff my taco with his meat.” How funny would it be if that was a literal ad… All I wanted was someone to help stuff tacos!
Today we had a departmental lunch for no particular reason, except maybe to reward everyone for dealing with some of the busyness that we’ve been going through in the last month.
So the lunch was at The Oceanaire. It’s a chain restaurant with a sort of classic steakhouse decor. However, it is more focused on seafood. We were given a number of options for our meal, because if it had just been me, I would only have ordered an entree. All the donuts are making me chunky enough. For an appetizer, I had crab cake with mustard mayonnaise. Then there was New England Clam Chowder and for an entree, grilled salmon. Sides included hash browns, asparagus with hollandaise sauce and green beans almandine.
The crab cake was tasty with a very small amount of binding materials like mayo and not fried within an inch of its life. The mustard mayonnaise was complementary, and the table was well equipped with Tabasco sauce and Old Bay. The excellent trademarks of a seafood house that knows its seafood or at least Marylanders. The New England clam chowder was lovely and creamy with pieces of bacon to lend a nice salty, smoky flavor. However, I think that the vegetables could have stood to be boiled to the level that they were not nearly as crisp. I ordered the grilled salmon medium-rare, which it was. It was moist and tender, though I only managed to eat three bites given the quantity of other food preceding it. I had never tried hollandaise, so I don’t know if it’s meant only to taste like melted butter. While it’s nice, I could feel my arteries crying in anguish. The green beans were a tad too peppery, but otherwise nice and crisp. Hash browns were mediocre and perhaps brown a little bit too long. I would say the best part was the dessert of what I believe was a peachy-orange sorbet and cheesecake. The cheesecake was crustless. I usually consider the crust to be the best part. But this cheesecake was amazing as it was. The filling was just sweet enough without the usual cloying, toothaching sweetness so common to most cheesecakes. Compared to a number of the other restaurants I have visited, I would highly recommend the Oceannaire.
