Had a fun lunch at the Druid this past Friday, a place we both love but hadn’t been in years. Because we were without spring onion, we settled in at the bar where we got friendly and prompt service. B loved his grilled chicken sandwich - bun was griddled, chicken was moist, not too much bacon. I gotta say, though, my seafood stew was the winner that day. Has this always been on the menu? I used to always get the veggie burger. Huge bowl brimming with tomato-based broth and shrimp, clams, mussels, and whitefish (albeit, the clams and mussels were a bit on the small size). As always, the brown bread to start is a pleasure in this day and age when bread is no longer a given.
On Saturday, we had a late lunch/early dinner at La Posada with spring onion. He loves their freshly-fried tortilla chips and ate quite a lot of his sopa de albondigas. I had already eaten lunch so I went small with sopa de Azteca (Mexican chicken soup), which is nice and rich with spices but a tad salty. B’s carnitas was declared good as always. Now that spring onion is a bit more patient with us out in restaurants, La Posada is back in our usual rotation.
Sometimes the best places are not the new shiny kids on the block, but the old favorites that just feel so right. Or maybe we’re just getting old?!
Had disappointing fish and chips here recently at lunch. They were so tightly wrapped in a paper bundle that the steam had already started to turn both fish and chips a bit soggy. Worse both items were overloaded with dried rosemary (a herb that’s easy to overdo) – enough that that was the only aftertaste left. I don’t remember the rosemary from previous experiences (although the last time was over three years ago, and I may not remember right).
My companion’s caesar salad was okay, but without the grace of anchovy.
Bummer to hear you had a bad experience. We recently had another good lunch at the Druid after an MIT Museum visit. I guess it’s all a matter of taste, which is always variable and keeps life interesting and us on our toes.
We rediscovered the Druid last year after some time away and have really been enjoying it. The food all seems to be made from scratch without being overly engineered; mostly classics done well.
It seems sacrilege to post this in a “…but goodies” thread, but there’s no convenient “…but baddies” thread.
My experiences at the Druid have been more mixed than those of others here. I’ve had good lunches and mediocre, but a couple of weeks ago my daughter and I had a really bad one. My fish and chips were rosemaried with restraint (see above) – thank cod! – but were fried to a point of virtually inedible toughness. Now, the correct texture of fried fish is a cultural matter. I’ve had fried fish in Kerala that is deliberately fried till it has a dried, chewy texture. But the fish-friar that day at Druid neither had the sense to stop at the right, tender point (just shy of flaking), nor the courage to take it to full jerky. It was awful. I unhappily ate a quarter, then had them pack the rest for my wife. (What is marriage without the occasional challenge?) She called a half hour later from her office, where I had dropped it off, asking what I was trying to do to her.
My daughter had a bowl of mussels. The shellfish themselves (and their broth), were both unexceptionable and unexceptional, and would need no particular comment, except that somebody in the kitchen had had the bright idea of smothering everything with roughly chopped, raw tomato and red onion. I asked if we could have bread, so that my daughter could at least sop up some broth (naively thinking toasted baguette slices) and they brought out a slice of Irish brown bread. Not the prefect accompaniment to soak up mussel broth, but it was the tastiest morsel of the meal.
