About This Site

If you're like me, you'll ask your friends for restaurant suggestions before you venture out for a meal - especially if you're visiting a new city.

I travel around the world for business and pleasure, and I like to take pictures of the meals I'm served along the way.  I'll post those pictures along with a thumbs up or thumbs down recommendation for each restaurant, and I welcome your suggestions as well.

Rick Palmer 

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The Capital Grille - my favorite high end steak and seafood restaurant of the year

Submitted by Rick on Mon, 07/26/2010 - 18:18

This high end steak and seafood house is perfect for impressing your significant other, celebrating a special occasion, or just plain endulging your taste buds.  Their top notch service, exhaustive wine list, and classy decor knocked this meal out of the ball park for me and earns my "favorite high end steak and seafood restaurant of the year" designation!

The Capital Grille is appropriately named and located in Tyson's Corner near Washington DC.  They're famous for their tender, aged beef stakes and fresh seafood and I had their cedar plank salmon.  Absolutely amazing! Very large portions and I was completely stuffed with just a side order of rice sprinkled lightly with ginger. 

Be ready to drop some money though.  The salmon was $34 and most of the steaks were in the $45 range ala karte.  Side dishes are purchased separately and run about $9 - $15 each, though are large enough to easily share between 2 people.

Leave your casual attire at home to.  This is fine dining and I felt way out of place in my jeans, polo shirt, and flip flops (fine for west coast restaurants but conspicious among formal east coast patrons).  Nonetheless, they were able to squeeze me in without reservations and my server Chris Cline made me feel completely at ease.

In fact, I recommend requesting him by name when you make reservations.  He had the perfect combination of professional attentiveness to every detail, while not being in the least bit intrusive.  He was very knowledgable about the menu and I loved his little wine pouring trick that started about 8 inches above my glass and somehow didn't spill a single drop.

 

Apricot's, Farmington, CT - beautiful river view dining

Submitted by Rick on Sat, 07/24/2010 - 17:06

After the mediocre experience I had the previous night at Confetti's, I was determined to search long and hard until I found a winner.  I drove around the Farmington/Plainville area for quite a while using MotionX GPS on my iPhone (being a geek at heart, I never travel without my gadgets).

I was about ready to give up and settle for something fast when I passed a series of nice houses along the Farmington River. I slowed down to take in the scenery and saw a sign for Apricot's on the left side facing the river.

To be honest, the name "Apricot's" didn't impress me much, and so I kept driving until I came to an outdoor mall and had time to look them up. Then I realized it was worth checking out after reading the great reviews, reading the menu online, and seeing pictures of the restaurant where many weddings and special events had taken place.

Apricot's has plenty of river-side outdoor dining along with a casual pub and parlor on the lower floor.  They also have two formal dining rooms upstairs with a great view of the river.

I started out with one of my favorite appetizers - steamed muscles from Prince Edward Island.  They were perfectly cooked and the white wine garlic broth made great dipping sauce for the bread.

For the main course I had their sauteed sesame crusted ahi tuna, served over a delicious Asian seaweed salad with a ponzu sauce and appropriately garnished with tender jasmine rice.  Exactly what I was craving and met my seared tuna needs once and for all :-)

Confetti's, Plainville, CT - Mismatched decor and garnishes

Submitted by Rick on Sat, 07/24/2010 - 16:23

If you're traveling through the suburbs near Hartford, Connecticut you might find yourself passing through Farmington and Plainville where there aren't many good restaurant options.  I was in a similar boat recently and made the mistake of dining at Confetti's on Farmington Avenue.

My server was friendly and did a great job under the circumstances, but she had her hands full taking care of a very loud 6-top next to me.  They each had several drinks and seemed to think it was ok to swear frequently, which is a little tacky though not something a restaurant can necessarily control... unless you're the owner or manager, which one of them seemed to be (thanked me on the way out for coming in, and walked in and out of the kitchen a couple times during their meal).

As for the food, I had a seared Ahi tuna from the specials listed that evening and was dissappointed.  Not necessarily with the tuna itself but with everything else surrounding it.  The salad was made with regular head lettuce.  The tune was served with rice pilaf, which is too hard of a texture combined with seared tuna (jasmine rice would have been a much better combination).  Heavily-buttered broiled vegetables were also a mismatched garnish for this over-priced $23 dish.

 

The brightly colored menu should have been my first warning, the plain decor my second, and the empty restaurant except for the loud table in the corner should have been enough to keep me looking for another restaurant.

Lutter & Wegner in Berlin, Germany

Submitted by Rick on Mon, 05/24/2010 - 19:51

There's a gem of a restaurant waiting for you across the street from the historical Deutscher Dom (German Cathedral) in the Gendarmenmarkt square of Berlin, Germany.  Lutter & Wegner has menus in both English and German and the servers I interacted with all spoke good English, which is a big relief for English-speaking travelers like myself and makes for a much less stressful dining experience.

I had a medley of sea scallops and shrimp over white asparagus that was dribbled with hollandaise sauce and tasted so delicious that I found myself cutting small pieces to savor every last bite.  I paired the scallops with a dry German reisling at the recommendation of my server, that provided a fruity (even slightly tart) contrast to the entree.

White asparagus comes from the process of etiolation, which is the deprivation of light. Dirt is kept mounded around the emerging stalk, depriving it of light. The plant cannot produce chlorophyll without light, thus there is no green color to the stalks. White asparagus is slightly milder in flavor and more tender than green asparagus, even with the thick stalks shown above.

Lutter & Wegner has an incredible wine selection, and the walls inside are stacked high with an impressive display of wine bottles... which of course will make you want to  ask for the wine list.

Their outdoor seating is cozy and romantic (or would have been if my wife had been with me) with candles at each table, umbrellas to protect from the elements, and even blankets to wrap around your legs if it's chilly at night.

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