birthday dinner

[kismet09]

we went to Mas (farmhouse) in the Village for my birthday. It's new-ish, and had decent sounding vegetarian options. They offer a three-course tasting plus dessert, but we decided to go with two courses, cheeses, and dessert. Their menu is extremely flexible, which was nice. I even substituted sides on my entree. Here's what we ate:

Me --

• Salad of Local Summer Beans with a Truffle Vinaigrette, Maplebrook Farm Stracciatella & Brown Butter Croutons (stracciatella is this amazing mozzarella/cream concoction. i had never had it before. so good.)
• Roasted Long Island Duck Breast, Fingerling Potato Purée, Caramelized Brussels Sprouts and Grilled Baby Squash

Tim --

• Heirloom Tomato Tart on a Parmesan Sablée, Caramelized Onions & a Toasted Pine Nut Dressing
• Fried Zucchini Blossoms Stuffed with Mushroom Duxelle & Mustard Greens, Huitlacoche- Black Trumpet Purée, Baby Spinach, Roasted Radish & Almond Foam

Cheese -- 

• Spring Brook Farm “Tarentaise,” Reading, VT - Cow’s Milk, Alpine style, aged 1 year
• Cato Corner “Hooligan” Colchester, CT  - Cow’s Milk, pungent wash rind
• Belle Weather Farms “San Andreas” Petaluma, CA - Sheep’s Milk, crumbly with a buttermilk tang

Desserts

• Caramel Roasted Peaches over a Ricotta Pound Cake, Blackberry Compote & Sweet Corn Ice Cream
• Hazelnut-Milk Chocolate Mousse with Cocoa Streusel, Salted Caramel Ice Cream & Chocolate Ganache

I yelped it. here's the review, for posterity's sake:

The good: 

• attentive service: tons of wait staff, all friendly, patient, knowledgeable (and some of them were wearing fabulous shoes).
• potent and tasty vanilla old fashioned from cocktail menu.
• super-flexible menu: i ordered protein that was on the tasting menu (duck), with the sides that were attached to a completely different dish (mashed fingerlings, squash and brussels sprouts), and they were totally okay with it.
• obviously high quality produce: the heirloom tomato tart was the highlight. bean salad was also super good.
• water never empty.
• they played many of my favorite guilty pleasure indie rock songs (maybe they have pandora set for the same artists that i do -- it was eerie how close the selections were to my pandora mix).

The less good: 

• the lighting level is so low that many couldn't read the menu, so the servers would bring them little flashlights, which (to me) further spotlights those who are older/have less good vision. if they changed the color of the paper on the menu, and bumped the font size up just a bit, and didn't use italics, people might feel less self-conscious about their eyesight.
• the tables are really close together, which is fine if your neighbors are reasonable, but less so when they're loud, opinionated, and accidentally throw food on the floor.
• the bread person walked by us twice without offering us bread, to the point where we had to physically intervene and beg for bread (and we'd only had one piece! it wasn't like we'd had so much bread that we needed to be cut off!).
• the salt levels were just high enough that it made some of the foods taste salty, rather than just elevating the flavors. the boy didn't notice as much as i did, but i'm more sensitive to flavors in general. i would have preferred a bit less salt with salt at the table to adjust.
• if you tell us you'll explain the cheese plate, do more than just reiterating what we just read on the menu word for word (minus the words you forgot that we filled in).

overall, the good outweighed the less good (minus the salt level, which made me sad). i'm glad that we decided on two courses plus cheese plus dessert rather than appetizer, two larger dishes and dessert - the balance was better for us. the duck portion was huge compared to the boy's main (squash blossoms), but he got to eat most of the cheese, so balance was restored to a degree. we left full without feeling gluttonous, and even bought cupcakes down the street at molly's to eat upon returning home.