Bistro Daisy

The boyfriend and I celebrated an anniversary this week and I have been looking forward to a fancy dinner with him for a while! Sadly, because of the huge winter storm, I ended up stuck in Chicago for the better part of our special day so we had to postpone.

The next day we opened a bottle of bubbly and sat on our porch in the remarkably mild weather. It felt so good to be HOME and reflect on the past year and, obviously, to savor some champagne! I won't bore you with details and cut right to the chase. We went to Bistro Daisy. It was outstanding. This is where I need to bring my mother next time she visits.

It's beautiful inside, the wooden bar is lovely, the ceilings are painted a sky blue and the chandeliers look like they are original. But what really shone was the food. I normally only like my oysters raw or fried but I ordered an appetizer of poached oysters with an Herbsaint cream broth, fennel, tomatoes and bacon. WOW. This may be one of my favorite dishes of 2010. The excellent bread served to us sopped up the juices perfectly. Now my grandmother definitely never cooked with oysters or Herbsaint but something about the aroma of this brought me back to Sunday dinners in her kitchen so naturally, I loved it a little more for that. My sweetie got the sweetbreads, which were very good, but the accoutrements of sweet potato, bacon and pecans were not the perfect foil for the already rich meat. I like the zing of citrus to contrast such a rich dish.

For entrees, I ordered the duck with cracklings and a brandy-orange-foie gras demi. It was very tasty but I think they took the skin off to make the cracklings (which were addictive by the way!) but that meant that I lost the crisp skin with savory meat in each bite. I sort of missed that. It was good but GAHHHH!!!OOOOHHHH!!! MMMMMMMMMMM!!! The lamb shank that Ben ordered was out of this world. This is last-meal worthy food. The meat was unctuous, so luscious and flavorful, cooked in a bit of a tomato sauce with MINT and this taste made me think of my grandmother all over again. I would have thought Bistro Daisy had French leanings but I felt like I was in my Sicilian grandmother's basement kitchen. Basement kitchen, you ask? Yes indeed, the second kitchen in the basement where the real cooking happens but I suppose that's another post.

We skipped dessert in favor of espresso and a glass of port but they brought us a baked Alaska anyway, which was very sweet. Sweet of them, not overly sweet to taste. I don't know what they do to their meringue but it was the creamiest I have ever tasted, so much so that it just makes you want to slide it up against the roof of your mouth and mash it around with your tongue to prolong the experience.

We walked back to Nashville Avenue hand in hand in the breezy and wonderfully warm night air and really, I could not have asked for more. Go to Bistro Daisy, take your beloved, order the lamb.