Sunday night, Balkan Express Restaurant hosted an orthodox new year seafood feast. This is a small Serbian restaurant in the Graduate Hospital area, just a stone’s throw from Grace Tavern. It is operated by an adorable husband and wife team. The husband is the chef, and they even smoke all their own meats and fish here. They are normally closed on Sundays, and were just open on this Sunday for this special fixed price meal.

We first started with some seafood appetizers. There was a mushroom top with caviar. I am not a huge fan of mushrooms, and I had never had caviar before (that I can remember), but I liked this! There was also a deviled egg type thing, but with a seafood filling. Also, smoked salmon filled with more seafood. All of this was very good. I’m not the hughest smoked salmon (or salmon in general) fan, but I even liked it. And like I said, they smoke this themselves! I would love to see where / how they smoke all this stuff.
Next course was a seafood chowder. Another good dish. After that was a calamari salad with honeydew. A strange mix indeed, yet still good! Fresh, light, and different.

The entree was a mix of various seafood dishes. Starting clockwise from the top, we have sturgeon with a caviar sauce. I’ve never had sturgeon, and this was a very meaty fish. It almost even looks like pork. I liked it, but I wasn’t crazy about it. Right of the sturgeon is moussaka. Loved it. In the middle was an artichoke top stuffed with shrimp. I don’t like artichoke, but I ate up the shrimps in the middle. The bigfish filet on the bottom right was red snapper. This had a fantastic brown sauce, it was a lovely piece of fish. The shrimp skewer was on top of some rice. Rice good, shrimp great! And finally, at 9 o’clock is a scallop wrapped with home smoked proscuitto. This was ok. I was so stuffed at this point, I didn’t finish all of my food. And that so rarely happens with me.

For dessert, we got some orange cake and hazelnut cake. These were both excellent. A great ending to a great meal. And as an extra added surprise. they also gave us complimentary champagne, in celebration of the new year, along with some homemade slivovitz, a serbian plum brandy. This stuff was super strong, even though since this was homemade, it was much weaker than commercially produced slivovitz. I felt privileged to be treated to some homemade serbian moonshine!

This was an excellent meal. The owners were so nice and the wife explained everything to us and spoke with us many times throughout the meal. The husband/chef even came out at the end and charmed us all with his hilarious anecdotes. I think their kid was one of the servers. Poor kid, being forced to work at his parents’ restaurant instead of being allowed to participate in regular teenage shenanigans. This was a long meal as well, clocking in at about 3 hours. But all the more better since it was shared with good company, food, and restaurateurs.

I’d been hearing about La Viola all summer long. Everyone had been raving about it. It’s not a new place, but it seemed that everyone was discovering it this summer. There are two locations, both on south 16th, the original La Viola and the bigger and slightly nicer Ouest location. Because we had a big party, we had to go to Ouest on the west side of 16th. Hence the name. Please keep in mind that the Ouest dining room apparently has more items on the menu and that dishes are about $1-2 higher than the regular La Viola. In the original La Viola, it’s much smaller and more crowded.

La Viola Ouest does not have a sign. So good luck finding it. It’s basically in a row home, so it’s a long and narrow dining room. It’s decorated very simply. Real Italians, with accents and all, are the waiters there. It’s a BYOB, so bring your own booze people! No corkage fee either, which is nice! They give you free sourdough tasting bread that is warm, and (hopefully) home-baked. I quite enjoyed it.
The prices are quite reasonable. These veal dishes above were $14, as were most of the other veal dishes. There were plenty veal dishes to choose from. I don’t know what the first one is, but it certainly looks damn fancy. Are those veal medallions? The gnocchi was only $9. What a bargain.

I went with the lobster ravioli. I absolutely love ravioli so I try to order it whenever possible. And I especially love lobster ravioli. There were only five, but they were large. I wished there were 50 more! So yes, I liked them alot. In fact, everyone loved their food! There’s so much to choose from here, I definitely have to come back and try more dishes out.

La Viola
253 S. 16th St
215-735-8630

So Lolita is a byob, but it’s known as a byot, bring your own tequila. They happily allow you to bring your own tequila while they provide pitchers of margarita mix. They have the traditional lime as well as certain seasonal mixes. During my visit they offered traditional, blood orange, and blackberry. We went with the blackberry, which came with blackberry puree, thai basil, and sugared rimmed glasses. I didn’t put any booze in mine as I had to drive, but the virgin margarita was really, really, really good! I could have just drank it as a meal. But I didn’t!

We got some guacamole and queso with chorizo, and they also gave us some salsa, one green, one red, along with mixed chips. The mixed chips included corn, malanga, and plantain. They were good, and so was the salsa, especially the red, as it had a nice kick. The guacamole was good but nothing too exciting. I didn’t try the queso but it looked like it would probably be salty. That came with some home made hot corn tortillas.

I decided to go with the enchiladas verdes with chipotle shrimp. I had remembered some enchiladas verders I’d had in Mexico City so I was in an enchilada type mood. The enchiladas came with shiitake mushrooms, but since I don’t like mushrooms, I just went without them. The enchiladas themselves were really good, even though there was really only cheese in them, and so were the shrimp. The dish came with herbed rice and refried beans. The beans didn’t really seems refried, they seemed fairly whole, and they were good. I don’t recall there being much herbed rice. I think it was mixed up with the beans, but it seems relatively bean heavy.

Some of the other entrees also looked quite good. A few people got the chicken breast. I almost got the duck. I think someone got the pork chop? Is it a pork chop? or is it a big lamb chop? I don’t know. I’m bad with my chop knowledge. They are also somewhat vegetarian friendly as you can get pretty much any of the entrees substituted with tofu or portobello mushrooms.

They did have a dessert menu but they disappointed me by saying they were out of the creme brulee. It is a ginger-vanilla creme brulee. Damn it. But that’s ok, because instead, we went to feed my new Capogiro addiction. This time, I had kiwi and asian pear. I’ve never tasted something that tasted so much like asian pear other than a real asian pear! It is rather freakish. Once again, the kiwi kicked ass. Once again, I’m still dreaming about it!