Visiting Louisiana Through Tupelo

Since Andrew and I missed out on trying out Tupelo in our last visit to Inman Square (in case you didn't know, it's closed Mondays), we rounded up some of the usual gang for dinner on Friday:

Amy, Jen and Phu enjoyed some classic southern beers, including Abita's Purple Haze:


In the shot, you can see some of the delicious cornbread and butter that comes free with dinner. We went a little crazy with appetizers and ordered fried oysters off the regular menu, fried grits (with Frank's Red Hot sauce) off the specials menu:

The final appetizer was the steamed mussels with chunks of andouille sausage and whopping piece of bread to mop up the juices, very yummy:


Then it was onto the entrees - I like Tupelo's menu simply because the fact that it is pretty small in size, but each option sounds more delicious than the next!

Oddly enough, all the girls at the table (including me) went with the Daube of Beef with hominy mashed potatoes, roasted corn salsa and creole horseradish cream - I can't even begin to describe how flavorful and tender this meat was - you could literally take hunks off of it with just a fork, no knife needed! The boys ended up stealing meat from our plates:

Andrew was in the mood for seafood, so he chose the fried trout special - he ate every bite of this dish and said the crispy skin was his favorite part:


Phu went with the classic New Orleans Gumbo - the bowl it arrived in was massive:

Despite an impressive dessert menu, including options such as pecan pie, coconut cream pie and red velvet cake, Jen was the only one ordered dessert at Tupelo - thankfully, she was kind enough to let us all have a taste:

The rest of us opted for ice cream at Christina's - although, I can't figure out how we had the room for dessert after all the food we ate!

And a word of caution, Tupelo is in a fairly small space so there's always a line. By the time we left, close to 10 pm, there were still people waiting at the door.

Date Night in Inman Square

As Andrew pointed out to me tonight, it's a week of anniversaries for us - tonight marked two years since we first admitted we liked each other, tomorrow marks two months since we got engaged and Friday is our official two year anniversary which acknowledges our first date.

As we were in the celebratory mood, we decided to try something new and headed to Cambridge to try a new restaurant we'd heard a lot about from Jen F. - Tupelo.

Doh! Turns out it's closed on Mondays. Which ended up being OK since there were plenty of other restaurants as well. After some debate, we ruled out Bukowski's as we've been to the Boston location tons of times and headed into the East Coast Grill to experience "bold flavors and wood grilling."

Here's a shot of my dining companion perusing the menu - turns out, it's an odd combination of expensive sea food and random BBQ items:



Andrew enjoyed the Cambridge seasonal, especially since we don't typically see Cambridge served in the bars we frequent. It was quite tasty although I defaulted to my usual G&T. The pickled vegetables were delicious - slightly sweet and tangy and a nice change from the usual bread basket:


Andrew and I ended up ignoring the main menu (our apologies to the waitress) and ordering all appetizers and sides - this included bowls of corn and clam chowder (very good although slightly thinner in consistency than I prefer), grilled bread with garlic (YUM!), and Buffalo fried white shrimp (which had a great, not-too-spicy flavor and a crisp breading, although I swear I got the odd taste of cheeto each time I bit in):


As you can see from the empty plates, it was all good:


Unfortunately, we didn't anticipate how much the previous dishes would fill us, so when the ginger tuna & pork sausage dumplings (slightly too salty when paired with the soy sauce) and "damn good fries" arrived afterwards - we could only pick at the two dishes and ended up packing them up to go:


We made sure to save room for Christina's ice cream, which was only a few storefronts down. I had always heard of Christina's but had never tried the ice cream before. Although we were literally groaning from all the food we had just ingested, we had to check it out.

Although it was past 9 pm, the line for Christina's reached the door (but moved quickly). I'm not sure how well you can read the flavor board but they had tons of fun and unique flavors, including burnt sugar, Mexican chocolate, adzuki bean, green tea, cinnamon, orange chocolate and the list goes on and on:


I tried the burnt sugar flavor, which was good but I felt like it was a flavor I would get tired of quickly on its own. Andrew tried the Mexican chocolate which he cryptically said was good but reminded him of something he had tried before, but couldn't remember what. I ended up with a scoop of coconut butterfinger (two flavors I love separately that surprisingly meshed well together) and Andrew went with the butter toffee cashew.


We both loved our choices but I'm determined to come back to try the champagne sorbet!