dish and Houston's

For brunch on Sunday, we headed to a place that had opened recently, called "dish". It's a market/bistro. The full service bistro is only open during dinner hours. The market is open throughout the day. In the market, you can get prepared and made-to-order foods at various food stations.

Here are a few pics of the market:


We tried a naan bbq wrap ($8) and a 1/2 lemon herb rotisserie chicken ($5.50). For drinks, we had a GUS (Grown Up Soda) Dry Meyer Lemon soda and an Ito En Teas' Tea Rose Green Tea. The wrap was pretty good, though I thought it was a bit expensive for what you got. From what I remember, it was bbq pork, cheese, cabbage, and some sort of cream sauce, wrapped in naan. The rotisserie chicken was also good. The skin was really tasty (crispy and flavorful), though the white meat portions were a bit too dry. I thought it was a good value for $5.50. I really liked the GUS soda. The lemon flavor was just right and the drink itself wasn't overly sweet. The tea was a typical Japanese style drink - unsweetened green tea w/ hints of rose.

Here are a few pics of the food and one of the bistro area:



For dessert we tried gelato 3 flavors of gelato - Strawberry, Chocolate Hazelnut, and Lemoncello. We actually didn't order the Lemoncello, but the server scooped it by mistake so she gave us the dish for free. The Strawberry wasn't so good. It had a strange texture (almost too smooth) and flavor. We think it was actually Kiwi-Strawberry. The other two flavors were decent. The gelato at Arlecchino Gelateria is much better.



It's a neat place but I'm not sure if it will survive. The place is huge and the rent must be way up there. It also seemed to be way overstaffed - I'm guessing there are around 50+ employees working at any one time. I wouldn't go out of my way just for the food. We'll see...

For dinner, we met up with Denise and her brother, Cedric, at Houston's (Biltmore location). I ordered a bbq burger and Patty (and Denise) had a sea bass special. No pics - it was too dark inside.

The burger was just ok. Can't think of much more to say about it. The sea bass didn't taste like anything like Chilean Sea Bass. We flagged down one of the servers and told him about the fish and he replied that it was a "Blue Nose Sea Bass" and that it should have a very similar taste and texture to Chilean Sea Bass. It didn't - it tasted more like swordfish or mahi-mahi. Both Denise and Patty replaced the dish with a Crab Cake special (that Cedric had ordered). The crab cakes were pretty good - full of large chunks of crab meat. We were kind of shocked though when we got the bill - they were $32! Houston's is supposed to be well-known for its customer service, and on past visits the food has been pretty good (for a chain). Overall, we left disappointed.