Eating in New Haven with Mari and Evan

Continued from the last post...

The first thing Mari did when I arrived Friday night was plot our plan of attack on her favorite New Haven restaurants. Nothing loath, I of course acquiesced immediately!

Here's the list:

• Saturday breakfast: toast and tea (in preparation for)
• Saturday lunch: Caseus
• Saturday dinner: light meal at home (to recover from Caseus)
• Saturday night: cocktails at Jonathan's
• Sunday morning: brunch at Bella's
• Sunday 4 pm: New Haven pizza at Modern
• Sunday evening: Amaretto cocoa and cookies at home
• Monday breakfast: Evan's scones, eggs, and Sarah's tomato-orange marmalade

As you can see we had a busy schedule! Fortunately we did intersperse all that eating with some hikes around the Yale campus, through Sleeping Giant State Park, and up East Rock.

The food in chronological order

Caseus: Poutine, Kale and Grain Salad, Flatbread pizza with kale, braised buffalo rib meat, and tangy mustard sauce.

Drew's favorite Basque cider at Caseus. It is slightly sour and yeasty, went really well with the flatbread pizza.

Our own cheese plate with apple, nuts, and red wine for a light supper.

No pictures of Jonathan's cocktails--the grapefruit margarita was wonderful though.

We had brunch at Bella's with Sam and Jess. Sam's a social worker with the local VA hospital and Jess is in the first year of the advanced practice nursing program at Yale so we talked shop a lot. I hope we didn't bore Mari and Evan too much, but Jess and I had a great time! Bella's food takes a while so we had plenty of time to talk too. It was so worth waiting for that I didn't even manage to take any pictures. Oh well, you will just have to imagine the following: eggs Benedict with slabs of ham steak, coconut-crusted challah french toast with bananas in rum praline sauce, poached eggs on crispy crusted cod and crab cakes with cilantro remoulade, blueberry banana pancakes piled with strawberries and whipped cream, and fried polenta rounds with broccoli rabe in spicy tomato sauce. It really was just as good as it sounds too.

Clam casino pizza for dinner. 

New Haven pizza is always thin crust and often with white sauce like this clam, pepper, and bacon version. (They don't permit ham and pineapple either--you have to go out west for that.)

We had lucky eggs Monday morning, two of the three were double yolkers!

Peeled grapefruit, scones, eggs, and multiple kinds of jam.

I waved Mari and Evan on their way this morning and warmed up the rest of the pizza in the oven for lunch. It was really good with pineapple salsa on it for some variety the second time around. Take that oh anti-pineapple New Haven pizza culture! I should be all set for my train ride this evening.