Last night was Friday Night Date Night, the night of the week where Wife N. and I practice the date night state-of-mind, even if it means staying home and cooking in.
But tonight, we gave a second visit to Restaurant Ama, which at the moment is the west 'burbs closest legit tapas bar.
This review is an amalgam of two visits; one about three weeks back, and last night. Both Friday nights.
The cool thing about tapas bars is that each time you go (up to a point anyway) you get to sample a variety of different bite-size Pinxtos ("pinchos") and Tapas (small plate) dishes. It's also one of the problems: I keep wanting to order that delicious plate I had last time, instead of being focused on the goal of trying something new every time I visit.
In the end, this second visit overlapped the first only in that Pork Belly, which won out over my ultimate goal.
Delicious as it was last visit, the perfectly-seared pork belly was a delicious bite of an umami-bomb. The tangy salsa verde and the crunch of a crostini base augmented the meat while the baby shishito peppers lifted everything with their off-bitter bite.
Gildas: bite-sized skewers of almost-creamy marinated sardine, green olive and two tiny banana peppers (think mild pepperoncini) all in one bite. It's two briny, creamy, fishy, tangy-yet-smooth bites of heaven.
Papas Bravas: Delightfully-crisp fried potato wedges with a warmly-spiced bravas sauce, and a cooling beef fat aioli made for a lovely second.
Grilled octopus: four bite-sized skewers with tenderly-grilled octopus cube, and roughly equal portions of confit potato and chorizo-stuffed green olive. Salsa verde. Wow.
Queso Quemado: Baguette slices on which to spread the deeply-flavored and bitter-leaning salvitxada ("the orange colored sauce") and honey. Each element had a purpose, but the proportions were off-kilter. We felt there was way too much of the salvitxada, and not enough honey to balance it. The plate would have been better with half the sauce, but otherwise it was a good dish and the one dish we wished we'd eaten earlier in the course. The cheese, a half-inch-thick slice, hits the table hot and melty. 8 minutes (getting through the plates) later it's firm and doesn't spread and gets that "I used to be a hot cheese" cold cheese texture. Goes from a 4* dish to a 2* once it congeals. Best scarf down this one the moment it's brought to the table.
Grilled Broccolini: great flavor combinations on this plate. It's a decent grilled veg to begin with, but then they add this ajo blanco (white, creamy sauce that tastes of almonds--think something along the lines of a soupy nutty Peruvian hummus), a quick drizzle of mild chili oil, and shaved garlic chips on top and this plate becomes a complex interweaving of flavors and textures.
Grilled Endive: Nicely grilled, very flavorful, but could have used more restraint with the saucing. Half the amount would have been perfect.
Rabas: think fried calamari rings. Great, good texture, but...probably about average. They were fine.
Mussels: perfectly acceptable, great even, but nothing to write home about. Tastes just like white wine and chorizo mussels, which is what it is.
Bone Marrow: west of the hill? Say whuuuuutt? As perfect as we'd hoped it would be.
We shared the Txuleton (chu-le-tone) steak, rare. It came with fries, more of that salvitxada, and lemon wedges. The steak was flavorful, if a tad closer to mid-rare than rare (which wasn't really an issue, we were aiming for mid-rare anyway, but any time we order mid-rare we always get medium so we tend to order towards the rare side). Meat itself had been well-seasoned. We're not 100% sold on the salvitxada (though, traditionally, we do understand it's what one serves at a barbecue) but we found those lemon wedges brought the entire plate together. Get some lemon juice all over that orange sauce, and oddly, almost like miracle fruit, the bitterness of the salvitxada greatly diminishes and all the other flavors in the beef come alive as well. The lemon unlocks the flavors!
Cocktails:
* Flower Garden: much more floral than sweet herbal/floral drink. Delicious.
* Birds of Paradise: Oh man I could not get enough of this drink (but alas, I was the driver, so one was enough, even though I'd otherwise want another).
* Good Ol' Fashioned: Pretty typical, decent.
Our overall cocktail impression: their in-house recipes are fabulous. Repeats of "every bar has one of these" are average to a tick above. You can get the same Old Fashioned everywhere--come here for the cool house recipes.
Succumbed to the desire to cap it off with dessert. Had the Creme Catalina. Think "a creme brulee and orangy-citrus curd had a baby." Creamy not-quite custard interior, torch brulee on top. We've never had its equal.
Guys, Ama nails it for anyone within a reasonable distance of downtown Hillsboro who has anything from the munchies on up and for whom tapas sounds good. read more