As part of the Philadelphia Science Festival I attended the Flavor Tripping event. Flavor tripping you say? Yep, the miracle fruit. You’ve heard of it. Synsepalum dulcificum comes from west africa and it makes things that are sour or bitter taste sweet. I’d wanted to try this for a long time so I was super excited that there was going to be a special Tasting Menu at the Continental for trying this miracle berry.
But first, we played a bit with our taste buds. The folks at Monell Chemical Senses Center put together six vials of random tastes for us to try. It was a bit of a tease for what was about to come up next. Vial #1 was PTC, which only some people can taste. To some it tastes bitter (like me). To others it just tastes like water. So cool! Vial #2 was an amino acid that tasted kinda salty… a bit like sweat. It was representative of the umami taste. You know, the other taste, the new one. Vial #3 was sodium something or other that cats really like. In fact, they sprinkle it on cat food to make cats eat it! Vial #4 was sweet and it was actually twice as sweet as any regular can of soda. I forget the last two vials… but it was really fun!
Ok, so after the taste bud experiments, we finally went on to the berries! These are freeze dried berries from Puerto Rico. The shelf life of the berries is super short, so it’s hard to get them fresh. But warm them up in your hand and they’ll defrost right up. You do not eat the seed. And you do not just swallow the berry. You chew on the pulp and try to get the pulp all over your tongue and all over the inside of your mouth. Then you’re ready to eat!
So I expected just a couple slices of lemon, but we got a proper meal in the tasting menu. We started with a giant plate of fresh sliced fruit. They made it a point to get non-ripe fruit and out-of-season berries. It included all types of berries and citrus fruits and some balsamic vinegar. Man, I was skeptical, but these berries really do work! Everything was sweet! The lemons, the limes, all the berries… so sweet and delicious! We dipped the fruit into the balsamic and it was even extra sweet! It was so bizarre but cool. My favorite was the raspberry dipped in balsamic.
Next up was some scallop ceviche with fried plantain chips. The scallops were so amazingly tender and sweet and delicious. There were bits of sliced pepper and while those were still spicy, they were also sweet! Because all that was on the scallops was straight up lemon juice, everything tasted sweet. And even the plantain chips were sweet! I know that if it weren’t for the berry, the scallops would just have been super tart and sour.
Granny smith apple and fennel salads in radicchio cups with a sour lemon vinaigrette. Pairing up the sourest apple with lemon made it all delicious. I don’t typically like fennel, but it was good here!
Dessert was lime, lemon, grapefruit, and blood orange sections with mint yogurt and pomegranate molasses. This actually sounds pretty good, at least without maybe the lime and lemon, even on its own as a dessert. But with the berries, it was almost too sweet!
Can you tell how much I enjoyed just the lemons and limes? They were amongst my favorites. They showed just how miraculous these little berries were. They gave us some mberries to take home with us, which are commercially produced miracle fruit tablets. Yes, I will be using them at home. I already bought a bunch of lemons and limes!

Sonata is an adorable BYOB in Liberties Walk. When I say adorable, I really mean it. Both E and I could not get over how cute the space is. I mean it’s pretty much just clean and simple, but also totally cute. It seems like a fairly subdued place, but the night we were there there was a very large birthday party table so it was a bit noisy from their festivities, but that doesn’t seem standard. And I love the music-related name. Their menu changes seasonally and is very small. In fact, it’s probably changed to the spring menu by now. I like the small menu because I don’t have to waffle between too many choices. We did get some help from our awesome server on some of his recommendations.
Freshly baked complimentary bread. It was warm, delicious, and herby.
We got the crispy pork belly as an appetizer. It is a giant and thick hunk of pork belly with a thick crispy skin with smoked tomato marmalade, compressed apple, and calvados molasses. Holy crap, this thing is just awesome. I mean pork belly in an of itself is awesome, but then you put all this other stuff with it and damn, I just can’t tell you how good this is. And it’s so damn pretty, too!
E got the cod entree. There are three pieces of potato wrapped pacific cod on napa cabbage and hedgehog mushroom in a sweet onion cream. The fish was super fresh and cooked perfectly and E could not get over how much she loved the cabbage.
I was also pretty crazy about my entree, the chicken. It was a pan roasted bacon wrapped chicken with chestnut stuffing, bourbon whipped potato, haricot vert, and glazed cipolini onion. First off, the chicken was beyond tender, having been pounded, but then once wrapped in oodles of butter, it gets even more tender and beyond juicy. I love chicken that melts in your mouth. The potatoes were great, the green beans were just crispy enough, and I love the cute little onions so much that I wished the plate was full of them.
Ok, onto the dish that E loved the most… her dessert! It was basically a trio of chocolate goodness – warm chocolate beignets, chocolate decadence, and a chocolate hazelnut chipwich. Ok, so these beignets, they were warm and had ooey gooey chocolate on the inside. Like seriously. And she pretty much wanted to marry this chocolate decadence.
I got the apple pie for dessert, only these were adorable little mini fried apple pies with vanilla whiskey ice cream and caramel sauce. These were so cute and tasty! The ice cream was pretty intense… I thought to myself “it’s like vanilla, only with extra awesome.” Then I realized that the awesome was whiskey.
And with our check came these homemade chocolates with caramel and  sea salt. Yes, they were as good as the rest of the meal. E and I both loved our meals at Sonata so much that we can’t wait to go back. Not only was the food perfect, the service was excellent. Everything was just spot on. Even the executive chef, Mark Tropea, came out to check in with us after our meal. We felt so honored. We can’t recommend this place enough!

After a pretty lackluster first friday and major fails with the parking machines, we tried to eat at Han Dynasty. That wasn’t going to happen without a long wait, so we ended up in Chinatown at Sang Kee Peking Duck House.
H/A always like to get the mayonnaise shrimp with walnuts, so he ordered that. Well folks, let’s just say that you shouldn’t order shrimp with walnuts at a restaurant that bills itself as a duck house. We think they used panko breadcrumbs, which is just wrong for this. And instead of coming with broccoli, it came on top of a bed of shredded iceberg lettuce. It was all just weird. And the oranges tasted like they were rotten. But one highlight – the walnuts were delicious! But overall, it was pretty much a fail. I think it’s a smart thing to stick with the duck or the roast pork or something at this joint.
I ordered one of the ho fun dishes… honestly, I don’t even know which one it is. I saw some guy at another table with it and I just pointed to it and said that’s what I want. So that’s what I got. And it was hot and delicious and noodley and meaty and we ate it all. This sure beat the shrimp dish… by about a thousand shrimp. We had some major communication issues that day. We asked for a couple of bowls of rice and we got a couple of empty bowls. Then we asked for a couple of bowls of rice and we got one little bowl of rice. Oh well.