Downtown Raleigh Restaurant Week (part 1)
I officially need to go on a diet. Not because my overall eating habits have taken a turn for the worst (I still have my subscription to Cooking Light), but because it’s the end of Downtown Raleigh Restaurant Week.
Twice a year downtown Raleigh restaurants participate in this glorious event where they provide a three course meal (appetizer, entrée, dessert) for $20 or $30. It is a great opportunity to try restaurants that you’ve never been to before and sample some of their best dishes for a (sometimes) discounted price.
Seeing as how I never made it out to either of the last two restaurant weeks in the past year, I decided to make up for lost time and go to 4 in one week this go around. My waistline may hate me for that decision, but I did get to experience a lot of great Raleigh food!
Since I went to 4 places that each had 3 courses I won’t spend my time going over all 12 dishes that I ate. Instead I figured I’d choose my favorite dish from each meal. With some of them it was a very obvious choice, but with others it was hard for me to narrow down.
Let’s start with night one at the Globe. Although I had very high expectations for dinner at Globe (their Greek grilled cheese on the lunch menu is one of my favorite lunch treats!), their restaurant week menu was unfortunately disappointing. The food was good, but it was not above average and sadly not really worth the $30 per person price.
That being said, I did really enjoy the farmers market gazpacho that I had as my first course. It was more flavorful than any other gazpacho that I’ve had before (most of the time I think they taste just like glorified salsa), and it tasted almost smokey as if they had added in liquid smoke. I really don’t think it’s worth the $7 price tag that it has on their regular menu, but if you are seriously craving some good gazpacho and price is not an issue, check out what Globe has to offer.
My second stop was at 18 Seaboard for their $20 per person menu. They offered a really fantastic three course dinner that could easily have been worth twice that amount, so that made all of the food taste that much better. My favorite part of this meal was again the first course, and I chose to have the she-crab soup.
I’ve mentioned previously how I never turn down a chance to order she-crab soup, and I’ve found very few places that can really do it justice. 18 Seaboard’s version was pretty darn close to one of the best variations I’ve tried thus far.
Although it was very much full of cream, they didn’t skimp on the sherry or the huge chunks of crab meat (the two best parts!). It was very creamy without having that flavor drown out the other components of the soup (which so often happens with creamy she-crab). My only complaint is that they served us a heaping bowl full of the soup and I was almost stuffed by the time my second course came out!
Now you would think that I would have stopped there with the 3 course meals. Oh no, I was only just getting started…
Lady with a Fork 