She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed and I quietly celebrated our 23rd wedding anniversary recently with a sedate dinner at the Left Bank Brasserie, a chain of five Bay Area locations with a soft spot in our hearts because it manages to nestle into this sweet spot between casual and formal, cheap and expensive, comfort food and haute cuisine.
You can have dinner that seems a special but not a splurge. Plus, it’s close. And we can always drop in to find a table.
SWMBO hosted my 50th birthday party there, as some of you will recall.
She loves the ‘Frits de Mer,” a lightly done fried calamari with shrimp and onions. I like it, too, but for its pleasantly unexpected twist: The breaded, fried lemon slices the chef throws in.
Left Bank’s menu features several dependable and long-standing dishes, like the Coq au Vin, yet manages to keep it fresh by offering a rotating series of dishes and wines from different regions of France.
On this latest visit, the Ms had the Trout Amandine. I had ravioli with a mushroom, short-rib stuffing. We prefer a red wine with any dish, so, faced with a wine list of many American varietals with which we were familiar and lots of French appellations with which we weren’t, we sought a recommendation.
And we actually got a pretty good one. The manager suggested a 2005 Petit Manou from France’s Medoc region. Despite Ms’ fear that our request was going to guide to the most expensive bottle on the wine list it took us to a reasonably priced $44 one.
I’m noting it as the subject of this post because I like what seems to me like the softer, more subtle character of European wines. This was that. And somewhat like a pinot noir, it suited the trout and the ravioli stuffing, leaning a little more toward the ravs.
To make this wine even more intriquing, however, is that I couldn’t find it much of anywhere aside from Left Bank’s wine list. The closest I could come to finding a professional review was at a site called Snooth, where a 2003 Petit Manou won a rating of 4 out of 5. The only retail source I could find in an exhaustive Google search was at a store called Surdyk’s in my old hometown of Minneapolis.
Hmmm. Got any wine sleuths out there can help solve this mystery. DJ, my friend, get on it.
Can we expect a post this quarter?