New Year's Dinner @ Hardware Grill

It will be our first 'New Year' as husband and wife.  So to celebrate, I, the wife, took B out for some fine dining experience in Edmonton.  Although it's not quite new year's yet, we had plans near downtown today, so it was best to 'celebrate' today.

Since I had an awesome lunch at Hardware Grill a while ago, I decided to take B there and also try the dinner experience.  B often criticizes that we only pay the extra money for the environment setting and not for great food.  This time I believe I proved him wrong.

To start, B ordered a crispy duck leg.  He already took a big bite out of it before I remembered to take a photo of it.  He loved it.  It took him a long time to eat it because he just didn't want to finish the experience.  He shared a bite with me, and yes, it was very good!

I had a soup of yesterday - something with bacon in it (more like that's the only thing I remembered!).  The reason why it's called soup of yesterday is because the soup was made yesterday, and this allows the soup to sit overnight and soak in all the flavours.  It was very flavourful and good.

Soup of Yesterday - a flavourful bacon soup.

For the mains, B had bacon wrapped elk and beef short ribs and I had sea bass with lobster-truffled potato crepes.  His elk was good (I almost ordered it), but my sea bass and crepes were awesome.  The crepes were filled with chunks (not shreds) of lobster meat.  The filling was also very creamy.  So good.

My sea bass and lobster crepe. 

What made the elk fell short was the incorporated horseradish.  We are just not big fans of horseradish. Wasabi is ok on sushi (well, B doesn't like that neither), but not on meat.  However, B solved the issue by cutting off the side of the elk with the horseradish, and enjoyed the rest of the dinner.  Just look how happy he is!

Happy B with his elk.

To finish off the dinner, we had a lava chocolate cake.  Sounds simple, but it was a fine dining experience   It was not sweet at all but so chocolaty at the same time.  It was paired with caramel popcorn and peanut butter ice cream.  Odd combination, but surprisingly good.  I forgot the photo AGAIN.  Please forgive me, since all I could think about was 'chocolate cake, must eat now'.

I'm glad this place met B's high expectations of fine dining.  I really like this place.  The food is very good.  Of course, it's not going to be a place we can go often (unless we win the next 649 draw), but it will be one of those places we would want to go again when we want to do something special!