Half a dozen blocks from our house is a new mixed use development called West Ave that is home to high end shopping, trendy apartments, and some really cool restaurants.
Cru is a wine bar with outposts in Houston, Austin, & Dallas, and with indoor & outdoor seating, really great music streaming lightly from hidden speakers, and a pretty modern decor, it was the perfect place for a romantically fun date night!
Feeling adventurous, we each started with a tasting flight of wines. Liz choose a flight of white wines with complete with 3 different sauvigon blancs from California and Washington while I picked a flight of reds entitled Bodacious Bordeaux. Each flight came with a note card detailing the name & year of the wine along with the growing region and brief description.
We walked into Cru at the tail end of their happy hour, so with the happy hour menu in effect, we started with a couple of the happy hour specials.
First thing out of the kitchen was lamb chop lollipops paired with goat cheese, mint, a balsamic reduction, crispy prosciutto, and fig demi. The lamb was cooked medium rare with a nice sear on the outside, and while the lamb itself was lacking in salt, the accompanying sauce provided the right amount of salt.
Along with the lamb came out goat cheese beignets.
While the "beignets" were closer to deep fried goat cheese balls, the batter was thick & smooth and the goat cheese inside melt in your mouth. True to form, the honey drizzled on the plate and beignets was an excellent touch and the dish was really a steal at $3!
Sticking with the small plates theme, we moved on to a charcuterie plate complete with chorizo, salami, foie gras, prosciutto, olives, grainy creole mustard, slices of crusty bread, and cornichons. Surprisingly we BOTH really enjoyed the foie gras spread over the bread and topped with the mustard, and the tiny olives were a nice touch of briny salt. The miss on the board was the salami-it was clearly a cheap cut of deli salami that lacked any flavor and would have been better left off the plate.
After 3 dishes from the land, it was time to go to the sea with ahi tuna tartare, served on a base of avocado, cucumber, tomato, and olive tapenade. The dish was a hit with very clean flavors and a nice chill on the fish, but the olive oil in the dish was phenomenal- a strange thing to note, but so true!
The service and overall experience at Cru was excellent, and proved to be a great first course before moving down the street to catch the 7:30 showing of Moneyball. The movie hit 3.5/5 stars in our book due to a lack of character development, so all in all, a great Friday date night!
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