Posted by Jim at March 4th, 2004

Kristen and I postponed Valentine’s Day one week.

When we did celebrate, we went to San Chez Bistro.

San Chez Bistro serves Tapas foods. What’s that? A long time ago Spanish bartenders started putting food on top of the drinks they served. Tapas is the cuisine that developed out of that idea.

They don’t balance it on top of the mugs anymore, but it is interesting. The portions are small. You order several different dishes and find that you’re full faster than you’d expect. That’s the good news. You also spend money faster than you’d expect. It’s one of the more expensive restaurants we go to.

That being said, it’s cheaper than good sushi.

San Chez serves a mixture of Spanish, Carribean, and Mediterranean food.

Here’s what we had:

1. A black bean, corn, red pepper, and cream salsa.
2. Pheasant and snake sausage.
3. An asparagus cassorole, placed on toasted bread.
4. Flan (for dessert)

I don’t know what kind of snake was in the sausage. The server may have said rattlesnake once, but the menu wasn’t specific–and the crowd was noisy, so I may have been hearing things.

Oh… And to drink… double chocolate stout.

It was all good.

One cool thing about San Chez is that the waiters actually know what they’re talking about. They can intelligently talk about the effects of different types of containers on beer. They also know about the food and can explain what certain things are.

I recommend San Chez to all–assuming you aren’t bringing kids and assuming you’re willing to try foods you’ve never heard of before.