Name this person

This young woman works at a restaurant in downtown Providence. What's the restaurant and who is she?

Broadway Bistro for a family outing

Friday night, August 1, Susie and I met up with six members of her large and very extended family for an early dinner at the Broadway Bistro. (They were coming up from OCS graduation in Newport on their way back to CT.)

Service was very good -- although the place filled up nicely by the time we left, we were never left feeling unattended. Food, as always, was delicious -- I had the gnocchi, which were quite large, in a scrumptious meat sauce. Most of the group had the Fish fry on risotto that evening -- lightly battered and fried they were a really big hit.

Again, you can go wrong here. 205 Broadway. Go tonight.

Gracie's Rooftop Garden

As more restaurants seek to establish a solid foundation on using local growers, at least one place has added a unique twist: Gracie's has set up its own rooftop herb and vegetable garden on top of the Peerless Building in downtown Pprovidence. How cool is that?

Gracie's wine flight

This past Wednesday Susie and I dropped by Gracie's -- well for her she simply came home, showered, changed clothes and returned to Gracie's. Anyway, we got in the car and drove the 3 or 4 minutes it took us to get to the restaurant.

It was quiet when we arrived but by the time we left the place was abuzz, mostly with folks either enjoying the wine flights or having a quiet drink and a light dinner in the lounge. We had no sooner sat down at the bar than the rest of the seats quickly filled up with small groups, mostly friends it seemed to me, there to enjoy an evening sharing food and wine.

The wines this past Wednesday were all reds, Malbecs from South America: two from Argentina and one from Chile.

For the food pairings Joel in the back of the house prepared steak, duck and added a hard unpasteurized cow's milk cheese from Wisconsin to the chef's tasting portion of the wine flights. Incredibly good match we thought later.

Over the years we've been underwhelmed with the handful of New World wines from south of the equator -- but this evening we learned how wrong we could be. The Chilean Escudo Rojo 2005 was the starter and it was a superb example of what happens when the French start dabbling in wines abroad: in this case the Rothschild family from Bordeaux. This wine had a pleasant nose and while it was a bit jammy on the palate it was very nicely matched with the food; this was followed by the Argentinian Les Perdices, a lesser wine we thought but not unpleasant, and finally the Luca Malbec, another delicious wine which was a superb match with the food, particularly the steak.

After wine flights we couldn't bring ourselves to leave -- it was comfortable and cozy so we decided to stay put and have dinner. A wonderful treat. Susie had the soup and a salad. I had steak and pommes du terre two ways.