no bargains at flea street cafe

the weekend after i broke my thumb (and um, also gashed my chin), we went to dinner with our friends lyd and mikey venturson. they live in saratoga, we live in sf, so when we get together for "dinner out," we usually pick a restaurant that's somewhere in the middle-ish.

this go-round, lyd picked the place: flea street cafe in menlo park. i think it might actually have been technically my turn, but that week, between keeping my hand elevated 24/7, finding out i needed surgery, getting surgery, and then dealing with the kind of pain that only overmedicating will take care of, i was pretty much useless. thankfully, most of the pain subsided by saturday early afternoon, so dinner out was a go.

when we got to the restaurant, we were greeted by numerous copies of a cookbook - strangely, one that i actually owned: Simply Organic. in fact, it was the very first cookbook i went out and bought after i read Omnivore's Dilemma (no, not my first cookbook ever). turns out the author of Simply Organic lives in the area and owns flea street cafe. guess i need to read those book prefaces more often. oh well. lyd had told me she chose the restaurant b/c she read about how it supports sustainable, organic farmers/producers. all in all, pretty cool and random (although i guess it wouldn't have been random had i bothered to read the front of the cookbook).

for our first course, i chose the toybox squash fritters (i'm not a good judge of deep-fried food. i luv it all); kevin and mikey had the caesar salad (very tasty); and lyd had the raw beet "ravioli" (she liked it). pretty great start.

i then made the mistake of ordering the salmon. long ago, i decided i would never order salmon at restaurants b/c they always cook it past where i like it. well, my non ability to cut my food for the next 4 weeks was 100% the reason i ordered it. MISTAKE. not the restaurant's fault at all since no one can cook salmon the way i like it except me. mikey had the salmon, too, and seemed to really like it. it came with beet potato mash, early summer vegetables (broccoflower and baby carrots), and a trio of sauces (though i forget what they were. they were kind of like chutneys.) kevin enjoyed the steak (hearst farms grass-raised rib eye), which came with a blue cheese topping and scalloped potatoes. lydia had the short ribs, which came with horseradish cream and summer beans, organic tomatoes, roasted new potatoes as sides. she won the ordering award for the night. the short ribs were great.

for dessert, we all shared the basil lemon cake (very yummy) and the midnight chocolate cake (VERY chocolate-y!).

all in all, dinner is best described as solid - i'd say a 3 out of 5. service was solid, the food was solid (despite the rigmarole with the salmon). that said, it was somewhat pricey - and i say that even after accounting for the higher cost of the organic / sustainable ingredients - and this is excluding the alcohol (although for once, *I* didn't have any. i know, shocking. do you mind picking yourselves off the floor? THANK you.). so if you go there, know that you might feel a little sticker shock given the cost v. the overall food experience. bottom line is this is a place that while i won't be rushing back to, i'd certainly be open to going to again.