Animal Restaurant

It should have been our first clue; naming a restaurant ANIMAL. I thought they just specialized in beef, chicken, pork, lamb. My friend looked at the menu on the internet and informed me that maybe we should split 1 thing and have several desserts, one being the specialty of the house which is bacon chocolate crunch bar with salt and pepper ice cream. After all, that's what made us make a reservation ...it was all about the dessert!

I have been trying to get a reservation on a weekend and they could only give me a 10:45 pm or 11:00 pm time. If I wanted a 6:00 pm reservation, I had to do it on a weeknight and so I did. It's a small place and by 7:00 pm on a Thursday night, it was packed and noisy. This is not a romantic place at all, no romance will take place at this venue.

We got the menu and indeed, it did not look appetizing. Pig tails, pig ear, slice pig head, veal brains. We decided to order the POLENTA, six-hour bolognese sauce with parmesan and the HALIBUT CRUDO with pickled crosnes, chickweed and paige mandarin. Our waiter informed us that they were small servings so maybe we could order 1 more entree. So we decided to try Bugs Bunny, the RABBIT LOIN SPRING ROLL, with eggplant,sprouts, green curry.

The polenta came in a small bowl, it was delicious at 4 bites each, it enticed our palates and we were ready for the next item which was the halibut. The small plate looked beautiful. There were 3 slices of the paige mandarin..but wait...where's the halibut? Underneath the mandarins were thin slices of what looked like raw halibut. Then there were pieces of what looked like larvae. I figured, with a name like Animal, I'm sure, insects are part of this zoo. I will try almost anything once, so I had a bite of the halibut, orange and the larva. It crunched as I chewed on it. My friend looked at my face and I just ordered her to try it. She did and that was it. When our waiter came to check on us, I asked him if indeed they were larvae. We were shocked to find out they were the cosnes (pronounced crone) which is a vegetable root. I looked it up and was described as looking like spiral pearls. No way would anyone think they look like any pearls! At $15, this was overpriced. We paid $10 for the presentation and $5 for the food. It was edible. The rabbit was much better, in fact it was very good. There were 4 small pieces (about an inch or so) of this spring rolls. They were crispy; the presentation was great but you could hardly enjoy whatever surrounded it, we just ate them.

Dessert time... we ordered 1 bacon chocolate crunch bar, with the S&P ice cream and the dark knight carrot cake, parsnip cream cheese, rootbeer w/walnut.
The carrot cake was covered with the cream cheese, and we immediately could smell the rootbeer. The carrot cake was dry and tasteless. We both could not understand how anything this bad could be in the menu. We had 1 bite each and that was it.
The bacon chocolate was good but not great; we both love bacon chocolate so we thought this would be outstanding. A small sliver was presented....the texture was more like a raw chocolate batter with bacon. The ice cream complemented the batter well. On a good note, they didn't charge us for the carrot cake.

Two doors down from Animal was Canters, an old delicatessen which we knew of but have never tried. We went in there and split a good old fashioned corned beef on rye and that concluded our dinner.