Top 10 Tuesday -- non-boring Baltimore Restaurant Week menu items
I spent some time looking over the posted menus on the website of Baltimore Restaurant Week, which begins this Friday.
Boring!!
Well, boring is not such a bad thing. Most restaurants are running selected specials, the tried and the true, from their regular menus, which is just what many diners are looking for.
And a deal is a deal. When it's a deal. Stay tuned to these pages for recaps and postings of the best and the worst Restaurant Week experiences.
Meanwhile, I managed to find 10 Restaurant Week menu items that made my heart leap, at least a little. Some of them look new to me, a few I've seen before.
In no particular order
Watertable -- I still haven't been to the restaurant in the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel. Shame on me. I was impressed with the Restaurant Week menu, though. What got my attention was this entree: Pincanha -- Brazilian grilled steak with black beans and rice. It's be swell if it's the right cut.
Slainte -- Pub menus are particularly disappointing. But take a look at the appetizer list at this Fells Point pub -- poutine fries, green leek soup, and, especially tempting, mushroom gnudi (gnocchi), fried golden with brown butter and sage.
Mr. Rain's Fun House -- And not because the restaurant atop the American Visionary Art Museum is hosting the Dining@Large happy hour. Take a look at the menu for yourself. What caught my eye -- the braised rabbit in pearl onion, garlic and marjoram sauce, a dish created to celebrate the upcoming Chinese New Year.
Pazo -- For their second course, participating diners here choose 4 from among 18 listed tapas. What made me hungriest -- the scallops a la planxa with celery root puree.
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Categories: Restaurant Week, Top Ten Tuesdays
Every week is Restaurant Week in Howard County. 
Here are the most commented-upon Dining@Large posts of 2010. There are probably better metrics (e.g., page views) for determining the popularity of a post. But something about these 10 posts obviously hit a nerve. If only there was a way to know which post will hit big, we'd do it every time.
Pacing is an acquired skill in blogging. Under-post, and folks stop checking in; over-post, and everything starts to look the same. 
Here's the web edition of Rob's glowing (surprise!) 
Well, 
I'm still looking at ways to establish this as a permanent fixture or widget, either on or off Dining at Large. This information is scattered elsewhere, both on baltimoresun.com and certainly on other web sites. I'm not trying to reinvent the Toast-R-Oven, but I am kind of liking how these deals look in simple list form. 
I took your suggestions for Top 10 weekly dining specials, threw in a few of mine, and sorted them by day of the week. I confirmed them all the best I could, by visiting the establishments web sites. When I found other weekly specials from the same establishment, I listed those, too. When I couldn't confirm, I said so. (Of course, send me links confirming the deals; restaurant owners and employees can confirm them simply by posting a response here)
Here are 10 or so soups that I'll be looking for when the weather finally snaps. With one exception, all of them, to the best of my knowledge, are regular menu items, at least for the season. 
I'll have the today's Top 10, cold-weather soups, later on today. Listen, if I get it done by midnight and slip it under your office door, would still count as Tuesday? 
I want to do a Top 10 soups for cool/cold weather. 
Finally, a perfect day to bring out my new 
"Group Dining" is now a Top Level category, and I've assigned all of the Zippy Larson posts to it, so they'll be easy to find. Keep reporting back about your group-dining experiences.
It's coming up on the time of year for reunions, family gatherings, adn office dinners.
several of swell things with their fried oysters (so this isn't strictly a list of "items"). 
I'm still sulking about how that 
I hate it when I confuse my "upscale localvore-focused contemporary American dining experiences" with my "cozy, casual and affordable French Brasseries with an American feel." But I managed to do that recently in a blog post. 
Neon colors and novelty shapes are not usually the hallmarks of quality food. So I was surprised last week when a colleague who is a serious foodie brought in a mix of peanuts, plain M&Ms and candy corn. 
It's back-to-school time. And while the kiddos learn reading, writing and arithmetic, parents get schooled in the politics of schoolhouse eating. 
I like my coffee hotter than my baristas.
After a vacation, and then two busy weeks back at work, my vegetable garden kind of got away from me.
While in Mount Vernon yesterday, I happened to come across an empty storefront at Cathedral and Read streets with a "coming soon" sign out front.
Old Bay ice cream seems to have gone the way we all fear Maryland crabs could go. By which I mean extinct. 
If I were at another stage of life, and in another income tax bracket, I might be dining out every night of the week during my vacation. 
A co-worker came back to the office chuckling after picking up an Iggies pizza for lunch the other day. 
The raw foods movement never looked so good, what with the heat lately.
I have what I consider to be a perfectly rational fear of industrial beef, one that anyone who's seen "
I had to work Saturday, which was kind of a bummer but for one thing: I had a morning assignment around the corner from the Waverly Farmers Market. With any luck, I could swing by before returning to the office and pick up a falafel sandwich for lunch.
We're entering prime time for locavores, as more Maryland crops come to market. For people who buy shares in Community Supported Agriculture ventures, it won't be long before the weekly produce pick-ups begin.
I had the chance to eat a 21-course meal in the kitchen at Volt Sunday, the night before chef Bryan Voltaggio lost out on that James Beard award.
The Baltimore Farmers' Market opens under the JFX Sunday, but don't get too excited. 
At the risk of looking like a rube, I'll admit it: I don’t get why truffles are such a big whoop.
The idea for today's Top Ten Tuesday list comes, once again, from Dining@Large reader Alexander D. Mitchell IV. Just the idea, mind you, not the list itself.
The inspiration for today's Top Ten Tuesday list came from language guru 
I put out a call for Top Ten Tuesday ideas, and Dining@Large readers came through so well that I seriously considered doing a Top Ten list of Top Ten list suggestions.
At this point if you haven't gotten your holiday shopping done and are a sane human being, you probably don't feel like going to the mall to finish up. 
In 
When I'm at a Chinese-American restaurant, I crave a whiskey sour. When I'm eating Tex-Mex food, a margarita is what I want. Of such stuff Top 10 lists are made. 
The idea for this Top 10 started with 
I'm on vacation until I get to my desk at work this morning, so I was thinking of just skipping Top 10 Tuesday this week -- the first time ever since it started.
It's hard not to do a Top 10 list that has something to do with St. Patrick's Day when it actually falls on a Tuesday. But Best Irish Pubs? Been there, 
I can't believe I've been writing this blog for 19 months and have never gotten around to doing a Top 10 list of places to get sour beef, an Old Baltimore classic if ever there was one.
I just learned that a week from this Wednesday, when this Top 10 would normally appear in the print edition of the food section, there won't be any room. It's going to be the all-cookie issue. This seems serendipitous because I'm on vacation and don't want to work too hard anyway.
I got so many suggestions for places to get good regular french fries that I decided not to include sweet potato fries. We'll have to make up another list for them.
Obviously anything could be an alternative to a traditional roast turkey for Thanksgiving, from a ribeye steak to a deep fried turkey. But I wanted to pick foods you know would work (because of their association with native Americans, for instance) or that I've actually served or had served to me.
Cripe. I forgot until this morning (actually about 2 a.m. when the thought woke me up) that I need a last-minute Top 10 Tuesday idea. I had it in my head that next week would be Top 10 Restaurants to Have Thanksgiving Dinner, but the editors want to do an all Thanksgiving food section on Nov. 19, so that would make the Top 10 about Thanksgiving have to be on Nov. 11 unless I can come up with a second Thanksgiving idea. And frankly, one is about my limit.
I mostly have to credit readers with these suggestions because you have to be eating with your infant or toddler to really know how restaurants are going to treat you.
It suddenly occurs to me that we haven't come up with a Top 10 topic for next Tuesday. I looked back at my list and none of them leaped out at me: Top 10 Restaurants You Wouldn't Expect to Be Kid Friendly, Top 10 Places to People Watch, Top 10 Best Deals on Wine (didn't we do that one?), Top 10 Places to Eat at the Bar. 
The idea seemed like a good one at the time: dive bars that have unexpectedly edible pub grub. The problem seemed to be that no one wanted to label their favorite hangout a dive bar with all the phrase's negative connotations, so I didn't get many suggestions.
When I decided to go with a Top 10 Most Difficult Foods to Eat, I thought, no problem. I'll do a search in the Sun archives, key phrase "difficult to eat," byline "Large."
Thanks to Jessica Lemmo for originally suggesting delis as a Top Ten, and Donny B for reminding me of the idea at least twice until I finally got around to it. 
A lot of people won't be satisfied with this list because it doesn't have any Harborplace restaurants on it, and that's where their out-of-town visitors want to go. But I decided not to include any national chains, so that limited me.
