I took the day off yesterday to take my car to the dealer to see if they could fix my flakey right headlight which has been flickering and occasionally goes out. No luck this time around, so I’ll have to return on the 13th when they have the parts in stock. So that kind of sucked, but the good thing is that my dealer’s service center was relocated to Port Chester which is a shitty depressed area totally on the upswing. It’s an area being rejuvinated with money from big chains like Costco and Bed Bath and Beyond, but this resurgence really started years ago thanks to the proliferation of really cool little places to eat that sprouted up on Main Street. Tandoori Taste of India had become my usual Indian restaurant after Dawat closed (the food at Bengal Tiger lacked the richness I prefer in my Indian dishes) and there were one or two other South American hole in the wall places I used to get takeout from, but I hadn’t taken the time to see what places had opened up there recently. Yesterday was my chance.

I walked the entire length of the strip of restaurants on Main, checking out every menu in the windows. The most notable newcomers were a BBQ restaurant named Q and a Peruvian tapas and ceviche restaurant called Patrias. Not feeling particularly carnivorous at the time, I opted to have lunch at the latter because I was really feelin’ some ceviche. I sat down and began to study the menu which had one page of chefs specials, another page of tapas divided into sections for hot and cold, and the remaining pages covering appetizers and entrees. I ordered four items- pulpo al a gallega (thin sliced octopus in olive oil) , the soup of the day which was a creamy asparagus number, ceviche mixto (mixed seafood ceviche) and piquillo peppers stuffed with seafood in a lobster bisque. The waiter gave me that cautionary, slightly awed look I am used to getting whenever I’m trying out a new restaurant for the first time.

As I waited for my food, I was served a piece of bread and a little dish of olive oil with chopped garlic and slivers of what I presume was basil. The garlicky oil was so good that I couldn’t stop eating the bread which is a rarity for me. Fortunately I didn’t have to wait long for my food. The pulpo came to the table in an elegant white bowl, a generous portion of octopus slices atop discs of peeled cooked potatoes, slathered in olive oil and dusted with paprika and coarse salt. I was a little suspect of the potatoes since I had never had pulpo served this way before and poorly cooked potatoes often just add a nasty dry texture do a dish. These spud wheels were cooked perfectly though and turned out to be a brilliant accompaniment because they eagerly soaked up the residual olive oil and paprika. For the last few bits of potato, I spooned over a bit of the garlic oil that was meant for the bread. I knew I had lots of food coming so I didn’t want to finish the potatoes, but they were so good I couldn’t resist.

Next up was the asparagus soup. This was a disappointment. Not particularly deep in asparagus flavor, and a bit over-salted. The croutons however were crunchy, buttery and delicious. I only had about half the soup and then moved onto the next dish which was the ceviche mixto. The raw fish in the ceviche was first rate. There were pieces of a white fish, perhaps a bass of some sort, scallops, shrimp, mussels and some type of sliced large clam which almost seemed like abalone. This ceviche was one of the best I’ve had and the serving size was enormous. But again, it was so good I polished off the whole thing.

The grand finale was a dish of piquillo peppers with a seafood stuffing which predominantly featured scallops and spinach. This dish was tasty but a bit too much. The stuffing was rich and the bisque it was sitting in was even richer, and the portion size was 5 peppers around a mound of perfectly cooked rice. I kept trying to eat the rice to cut the richness of the stuffing and bisque, but to no avail because all that rice just made me full. I only finished four of the five peppers because to go any further would just have been too much, even for me. Overall I was impressed by what they were serving there in the middle of Port Chester. Ambitious food and generous portions. I will definitely be back to sample more of the menu at a later date.

Later that night I still wasn’t really hungry enough to have a normal dinner, so I just snacked while watching tv. A few weeks ago, my supercool poker chick friend Heidi out in AZ sent me a Stew Leonard’s gift basket just because she’s a real good friend and she wanted to thank me for the work I’ve done in my spare time helping her out with her business. One of the items from the basket that I hadn’t eaten yet was a relatively ordinary looking box of sesame breadsticks. With the memory of the garlic oil I had at Patrias still fresh in my mind, I decided to chop up some garlic and drown it with several tablespoons of my finest olive oil and use the breadsticks for dipping. As it turned out, it was heaven. Yeah, we all know garlic and olive oil taste great no matter what, but these breadsticks were crisp, rich and delicious on their own and when dipped in the oil, man it was ridiculously good. I finished half the box before bedtime while re-watching the early episodes of Attic Cat… Just because I could. 🙂