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What's New at City Cafe
Post Bulletin, April 22, 2010
Jay Furst After eating a boatload of fried fish for the Lenten edition of Four Stars, the Post-Bulletin's monthly restaurant review, it was a relief to eat nothing but greens this month, as we went in search of fabulous salads.
The good news is, there's a lot of fresh, interesting greens to find in Rochester area restaurants, but few of the specialty entree salads are all that original. The kitchens that serve more than just routine house salads, Greeks or Caesars, tend to offer the same salad with a chicken breast on top, maybe dotted with a few canned mandarin orange slices or black olives.
At City Cafe Seafood Grille, a longtime downtown dining landmark with the best patio in town, they bring a creative touch to just about everything on the menu. With their flair for seafood, it's a great place to combine the freshest garden ingredients with the catch of the day, and their sea scallop salad is an easy Four Stars winner.
David Currie, one of the owners of City Cafe, says it's a reworking of a salad developed last year by chef Eric Pater. "We've modified it over time but it all starts with fresh, large sea scallops from Maine. We get them straight from the boat and Fed Ex'ed directly to us from Kittery, Maine." Atop a large plate of fresh greens, the Ritz cracker-sized diver scallops "are very clean and fresh — a fresh scallop has virtually no aroma to it, and a nice firm texture," David says.
They're lightly sauteed and served warm on mixed greens with Minnesota-made gorgonzola cheese, walnuts, red grapes, and tossed with a fig balsamic vinaigrette, which adds a tang and piquancy that doesn't overpower the delicate taste of the scallops.
David, 36, has worked in the restaurant since he was 12, through its various incarnations. It's been City Cafe for seven years now, and with his brother, Mark, and sister, Denise Villeneuve, they also have 300 First, Newt's and the Redwood Room in their Creative Cuisine group. At City Cafe, "we take a lot of pride in finding different little companies, East Coast or West Coast, that provide the best and freshest seafood — the scallops from Maine, mussels from Puget Sound, yellow jack from Florida — we go wherever to get the best quality fish we can get. We want people to rave about our food."
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