Urban Restaurant Review

Hello AA Readers. This edition of Apron Adventures is made possible by the color Red, the number 10, and Luke. That's right, after being Lindsay's photographer for the last several months, I thought it would be nice to start actually writing some posts. Since Lindsay has the home front covered so well, my posts will mostly be restaurant reviews.

Last week Lindsay and I were invited to a tasting at Urban, the restaurant in the Westin Hotel in the Domain. They recently hired a new chef (Mizael Saucedo, formerly at Bess), and are in the process of creating a new menu. Our tasting menu had 10 items, including a dessert, but they weren't able to tell us which of those plates would make it on to the new menu.

First, the dishes that really stood out were the sweet corn bisque, which was thick and creamy, with a deliciously roasty yet tangy undertone, and the pork prime rib, which was just a perfectly cooked cut of pork, served with baked apples and a warm-tasting sauce. My menu says it was caramelized soy, but it tasted like some sort of squash.

A close second to my two favorites was the butternut squash risotto. It was cheesy and rich without being too heavy or too thick. Also worth getting was the steak salad and the bacon spinach salad. I tend to be a sucker for interesting steak or bacon salads, and both of these were good, but I'd pick the steak salad again just for the warm strips of steak with bright pink centers.

The rest of the dishes we were served were well prepared, but didn't quite stand out as memorable foods. The crab cake was breadier than I expected. The quail was quail, typical bone-picking complaints there. Keeping with the pork prime rib and the steak salad, the bar steak was excellently cooked (I like my steaks on the medium side of rare), but didn't have enough supporting flavors.

The one dish everyone at the table agreed was lackluster was the seared tuna, served with fingerling potatoes, and truffle vinaigrette. The entire dish was served somewhere between chilled and room temperature, which might have made sense for the tuna if it were a little colder, but really felt odd for the potatoes. The tuna itself tasted alright, but had almost no flavor.

For dessert we were served an avocado tres leches cake. Wow. I'm hard to please for desert because I don't have much of a sweet tooth, but this one was moist yet still fluffy, sweet yet not overpowering. I'd never had an avocado tres leches before. The avocado adds more to the texture than the flavor, and the result is a smooth creamy feel, and a slight green color.