A Vegetarian (but delicious!) Dinner

We went to Green Zebra to celebrate someone's successful PhD defense. It's a vegetarian restaurant (she's a vegetarian) that is pricy but fortunately correspondingly tasty.

First we started off with this and bread:

It's a complimentary bite of a cherry and corn salad type thing. I think I tasted some fennel in it. It was alright. The thing was that it would have been significantly better chilled, which is such an easy thing to do that I was disappointed.

On the other hand, the bread was gorgeous. It was a whole wheat bread with just the right amount of crustiness on the outside and soft on the inside. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a picture before eating it up with a healthy swipe of butter

Here's the menu:

I ordered the beet salad and the roasted shitake rolls.

I apologize for the poor picture quality. It was one of those dim, atmospheric restaurants.

The salad was the better of the two, and it was good, with a sigh of contenment added at the end. It helps that I like beets, lemon, and goat cheese, all of which were included. It wasn't too light or rabbit-foody because of the beets and friend goat cheese, but the peppery greens and preserved lemon peel kept it fresh and bright.

The shitakes were good but not spectacular. The mushrooms were really well seasoned and cooked, the greens were good, and the potato wrap was good, but it just somehow wasn't that exciting. I think it was because texture was sort of bland, if that word can be used to describe a texture. The foam on top was also a little odd. It actually reminds me of fat foam, so it was a little off-putting.

For dessert I ordered dark chocolate beignets with bananas foster and creme fraiche ice cream. I'm a little sheepish to say that I ate most of it before I took a picture, but that was because it was DELICIOUS!

Anyway, you can still see the important components. The beignet is in the back left, the remaining lump of ice cream is in the back right, and a couple bananas foster are in the front. The bananas themselves were on the green side, so it wasn't too sweet, the ice cream was tart and was a good match for both the bananas and beignet, and the beignets had some melty dark chocolate filling on the inside.