Moxie

It is Restaurant Week in Cleveland and Michele was reviewing the list of published participants. After going through the list, she decided to highlight the places we had not visited for a long time. Moxie popped off the list almost immediately. Shortly after opening, we enjoyed Moxie a number of times, but we like to eat early. 6:30 reservations were increasingly hard to obtain and so, we started to forget about the place. We checked Open Table (the on-line restaurant reservation site www.opentable.com) and sure enough, 6:30 was not available, so we agreed to start-off early and make a 6:00 seating and boy, are we glad we did.

The restaurant week “3 for $30” special was intriguing, but the regular menu snagged Jeff in and the daily fish special pulled Michele down. Jeff started with the warm dates wrapped in bacon and served with arugula and a sherry vinaigrette. Michele decided on a Caesar salad. Lucky for her, they had anchovies and piled the salty guys high atop the crispy romaine with the rich parmesan laced dressing. Both were a nice beginning.

Michele selected the daily seafood special of pan roasted flounder served over a shrimp Creole croquette. The fish was perfectly browned and seared on the outside with a luscious texture inside. She had intended on taking one of the two filets home, but that idea ended shortly after the first bite. A clean plate went back to the kitchen, sans a few of the pepper flakes from the Creole seasoning in the croquette. Jeff thought it was perfect, but Michele is a bit sensitive to spicy-hot seasonings. Jeff was immediately drawn to the 12-hour Veal Roast; a beautiful, moist and tender filet-sized “chunk” of veal was surrounded by grilled Brussels sprouts sitting in a pool of sweet onion jus. Every slice was heaven and like Michele, a perfectly mopped plate went back to the dishwasher. Dessert was a butterscotch-banana crisp with cashew ice cream. It was tasty, but not one we’ll order again. The bananas seemed unusually heavy and the butterscotch seemed to get lost in the mix. Michele felt the cashew ice cream was missing a distinct flavor. Regardless, the whole experience made us question why we had been away so long.

The concept of Restaurant Week is to entice folks into independently run establishments. The reason for our blog is to convince people to eat at independent establishments, rather than chains. We often tell people, “Save your money, buy good food!” because we believe that good food is worth the effort and usually similarly priced to chain restaurants. Even for seasoned eaters like us, Restaurant Week did what it was supposed to do. It brought us into a place we had forgotten and provided us with a great meal. Talk about win-win!

List Status: Existing

http://moxietherestaurant.com/ 3355 Richmond Road Beachwood, OH 44122 216-831-5599

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