Clemenza’s in Fort Walton Beach
We have friends we have known for a long time who live only an hour away, and while we don’t get together as often as we would like to, we manage about once a month. We try to find places “in between” which there really aren’t very many, but our friends mentioned, if we wouldn’t mind the drive, that they had found a new restaurant they were enjoying and they thought we would, too, Clemenza’s in Fort Walton Beach.
We read the reviews on UrbanSpoon, which I am beginning to think is a big mistake. Some just seem like sour grapes, some seem over the top without being specific, and some seem like hate mail – we pretty much disregard all those. So while a lot of people really enjoyed Clemenza’s, others complained about problems with service, and problems with tasteless food.
Our experience was very different.
For once, we arrived before our friends, and that is not that easy to do. We were seated, and while we were waiting, I had a glass of wine, just a glass of the house Chianti, which was OK, but a little sweet for my taste. AdventureMan asked me how it was, and I said “OK.”
A gentleman at the table next to us asked me how my wine was, and I said “It’s OK. It’s not bad” and he asked what I had ordered. I told him the house Chianti, and repeated that it was OK, did he want to smell it? (I can always tell a lot just from sniffing, and I only bother tasting if it smells really good.) He thanked me and said ‘no.’
Minutes later, AdventureMan said “I think that might have been the owner.”
“Oh no!” I said, but it made sense that it might have been. Mere seconds later, he appeared at the table with a new glass of wine and asked me to taste it. Heaven. A very nice red; he called it the upgrade, and it was truly an upgrade. I felt embarrassed, but also delighted at that kind of attention to detail.
AdventureMan asked one waitress if she had tried the restaurant’s Red Beans and Rice on the blackboard specials, and she laughed and said ‘no’ but she could assure us they were really good because the cook was her stepfather, and he served the best red beans and rice at home and she was sure we would be delighted if we ordered them.
This was all starting off pretty good!
My favorite pasta, so simple but I just adore it, Aglio Oglio was not on the menu, but I asked the waitress if the chef could do it, and off she went to ask, coming back with a big grin and telling me he would be glad to.
Better and better.
Our friends arrived, conversation was lively, the restaurant was almost full, and delicious looking dishes were arriving at other tables. We placed our orders, and told her there was no hurry, and there really isn’t. As much as we like good food, we meet up to enjoy one another’s company, and good food is just icing on the cake.
Oh, What icing.
We shared appetizers, an Caponata and Calimari Fritti. YUMMMMM. The Caponata was perfect, and the toast was a little garlicky and well toasted, so the caponata didn’t make it soggy. The Calimari were light and melted in your mouth. Great start.
Side salad:
In a short time our main courses arrived. My Aglio Oglio (garlic and oil) was perfect. A little spicy, as I had asked, and a perfect size for lunch, just enough, not too much, just right. Everyone was happy with their entrees.
Clemenza’s Carbonara:
Pizza Margherita (look at that wealth of fresh basil and that thin crust, baked in a wood-burning oven 🙂 :
When the food and conversation is this good (and my upgrade Chianti) you just don’t want to stop. We split desserts, Tiramisu and Mama’s Custard Pie, both excellent choices:
We lingered over coffee, and no one was shooing us out. It was a superb experience overall, delicious, tasty food, attentive service without being intrusive, just a great overall experience. We were impressed. We look forward to meeting up here again. 🙂
Monday Night Blues at Five Sisters Blues Cafe in Pensacola
We kept wanting to go to Five Sisters Blues Cafe – everyone tells us it is a really fun place with great food – but it takes us a while to find it. I’m printing the Google map for you; it is at the corner of Belmont and DeVilliers. Not that hard to find if you know Pensacola, but we are still learning Pensacola.
Five Sisters exterior:
“Where’ve you been?” our waitress, Lisa, asked as we were seated. We must have looked goofy, we’ve never been there before, so we said, “this is our first time” and she laughed and said “I know that! I haven’t seen you before! We’ve been open a year! Where’ve you been?”
We just laughed, she had really caught us off guard. The place was packed, on a Wednesday afternoon, people all around us eating giant salads, plates heaped with fried chicken, everything we saw coming out to the tables looked delicious. Lisa brought us iced-tea, and I lost my heart, look, REAL mint in the tea, just like home . . .
We were overwhelmed. There is a lot going on in the restaurant, people laughing, art works on the walls, a new menu to peruse and we don’t know what we want. We finally decide to share the sampler platter with two fried green tomatoes, 4 crab cakes and 4 shrimp, which came with three very tasty sauces – WOW. Wowed right off the top:
AdventureMan even said, in wonder “This crab cake really tastes like crab with a C!” and it was. You know, the other kind, that calls itself crab, but is really flavored Alaskan pollock, and not crab at all? This was real crab, and it tasted crabby. Yummm.
AdventureMan had a vegetable platter. Now this is Southern cooking at it’s best, so don’t expect ‘vegetable’ to be Vegan. Even Mac and Cheese qualifies as a vegetable, and beans usually have some pork to flavor them, etc. He said the entire plate was delicious.
I tried something I had never had before, catish over grits. I never thought I liked grits until our daughter-in-laws stepmother (I know, I know, it sounds complicated, and it is another thing we have in common with people all over the world; we all have complicated relationships) made Smoked Gouda Grits one night with her Barbecued Shrimp and a whole new world opened up to me. Wooo HOOO. Anyway, I didn’t eat all the grits; the catfish was filling, but this dish knocked my socks off and I don’t think I could duplicate it, so I’m just going to have to go back to Five Sisters every time I get a craving for it:
If we are what we eat, we are becoming very Southern. 🙂
Lisa, the waitress, was a lot of fun, helpful in making recommendations, quick when we asked for anything, and she told us about an upcoming special jazz night that we really needed to attend. OK. That sounded like fun.
Lisa was right. It was really fun. We walked in, early, and every table was taken. There was a Jazz Society of Pensacola membership table at the entrance, and the lady just laughed and said “Look! There are lots of chairs empty, just go to a table and ask if you can join them.”
Hmm. We’re actually used to that, living in Germany all those years, but I didn’t know you could do that here. 🙂 We ended up at a table with another couple, and as we chatted, we had a really good time with them. They were so gracious and welcoming to people they had never met and who aren’t even members (yet) of the Jazz Society. We laughed a lot. He told us that they didn’t have a lot of rules, but that when things got lively, no oxygen machines were allowed on the dance floor because they might explode, LLOOLLL!
This place was ROCKIN’. People were dancing between the tables, people from young to old, just having a great time listening to some very very good music. Within an hour, there were no empty seats at all, some people were standing, and others were eating out on the covered patio. It was raining (rain in Pensacola during a drought is a good thing) and the evening was called Monday Night Blues. How cool is that? The atmosphere was perfect.
Of course we had dinner. AdventureMan had BBQ on Red Beans and Rice and I had the Shrimp Basket. No Mom, I did not eat the French Fries.
I did eat ONE of the hushpuppies. I could not resist. 😉
Five Sisters Blues Cafe is just a really fun place, immaculately clean, great food and great service. We can’t wait to go back again.
Red Robin – YUMMMMM
“I think I need a hamburger,” I said to AdventureMan as we were tucking in to bed. I can’t even remember the last time I had a hamburger, but I think it was in April, 2010, at the Red Robin in Pensacola.
Red Robin . . . YUMMM. One of the best ad campaigns in history, in my mind. Pure repetition, a little humor to re-inforce the memory, all positive. Anywhere you go in America, you can say “Red Robin” and someone will say “Yummm.”
I have a personal relationship with Red Robin. When I was a student at the University of Washington, long, long ago, the Red Robin was very near the university, near enough we could walk, even, and even though it was a bar, they weren’t very strict about carding people, and oh, they had the best burgers. It was pure comfort food. They also had a wonderful deck, so on the rare and beautiful spring days when final exams were coming and we just needed to blow off some steam, the Red Robin was one of the places we headed.
It wasn’t like the Red Robin chain. It was the original, and it was a little seedy. Here is what the original Red Robin looked like:
Yep. . . a little stoned.
Here is what he looks like now, he cleaned up good, LOL!
There were old wood floors, not the shiny kind of good wood floor, but the old fashioned cheap kind, sort of spongy when you walked on them, and usually covered with stuff that had been spilled. No, not exactly your family kind of place, it was a college student kind of place.
So for my once-in-more-than-a-year hamburger, we went to Red Robin.
Compare that to the original:
And here was my peppercorn burger:
It was YUMMMMM. Now, I won’t need another burger until September 2012 or so. 🙂
Sadly, as I was looking for some photos of the original Red Robin, I learned that they closed down the original on March 21, 2010. So sad, but I suspect it just didn’t suit the image of the new, family oriented Red Robins, more than 400 of them around the USA. But they still serve a good burger.
Businesses Support Police Blue Shepherd Sting
I love it. Operations like this cost money, and Pensacola businesses stepped up to the plate, even though they could not be told what the operation was about. It makes all the difference in the world when a police force has the community support. From today’s Pensacola News Journal:
It takes a village to catch a predator
Written by
Jamie Page
When undercover law enforcement officers slammed accused child sex predators to the ground and arrested them, the police had plenty of backup.
That is, financial backing from at least four local businesses that sponsored the sting operation by providing food, water, paper products and Internet service.
It’s a novel concept, but a necessary one for a budget-intensive operation such as this one, said Pensacola Police Chief Chip Simmons.
“We have had to do what we could to maintain that undercover location, and to do that we had to make it have everything a normal house would have,” Simmons said.
“So, we contacted businesses and they agreed to donate things to the cause. It’s always good to know there are good people and businesses to chip in and help.”
For a month, law enforcement agencies rented a vacant northeast Pensacola home to use as the point of arrest for 25 men during the weeklong undercover Operation Blue Shepherd. Suspects were accused of using the Internet to set up sexual encounters with children.
The suspects came to meet the minors at the home.
“We had to make it look like a living, breathing home with toys, bicycles, mailbox and trash cans outside, and we had to have furniture inside to make the view from the roadway consistent with what an average home would have,” Simmons said.
Many of those things came from police-seized items or were contributed by officers or others for use in the sting.
But the police needed help with other things, such as food and supplies, which were provided by the Apple Market, Dillards, Pensacola Improv Event Center and Cox Communications.
Businesses were not told the nature of the sting, but simply that their contributions would go toward a Pensacola Police Department operation.
“I did not know what they were doing, I just had an officer come to me and ask if I would be willing to provide meals for several people for several days in a row, but I couldn’t talk about it, and I said fine,” said David Apple, owner of Apple Market in Pensacola.
“I just knew I was assisting the Police Department. And anything we can do to assist them, well, we are always eager to support our military and law enforcement any way we can.”
Apple had to sign a confidentiality agreement and could not talk about his catering, which he provided to officers at a rate that allowed him basically to break even.
Apple Market could not deliver the food. Officers would pick it up and take it to the location, which Apple also was not told about.
“The only complaint they had about the food was that everybody gained weight,” Apple said. “It was pretty enormously satisfying to know we helped feed those guys and they were so successful in what they set out to do.”
Representatives from Cox, Dillards and Pensacola Improv could not be reached for comment.
Baked Salmon Dijon
We took separate cars to water aerobics this morning as my computer kept telling me I didn’t have an aircard (?????) and AdventureMan had his own errands to run. First, though, I had to make a run to Joe Pattis to pick up some salmon steaks . . . I have a yearning for Baked Salmon Dijon.
So easy to prepare. So good!
Baked Dijon Salmon
Serves 4
Ingredients
• 1/4 cup butter, melted
• 3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
• 1 1/2 tablespoons honey
• 1/4 cup dry bread crumbs
• 1/4 cup finely chopped pecans
• 4 teaspoons chopped fresh parsley
• 4 (4 ounce) fillets salmon
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 lemon, for garnish
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).
2. In a small bowl, stir together butter, mustard, and honey. Set aside. In another bowl, mix together bread crumbs, pecans, and parsley.
3. Brush each salmon fillet lightly with honey mustard mixture, and sprinkle the tops of the fillets with the bread crumb mixture.
4. Bake salmon 12 to 15 minutes in the preheated oven, or until it flakes easily with a fork. Season with salt and pepper, and garnish with a wedge of lemon.
This recipe, like many of the recipes I try comes from allrecipes.com, which sends me an e-mail every day with recipes I might like to try. At least once a week there is something of interest.
Once at the Geek Squad, my computer worked just fine. He mentioned sometimes an aging router can play tricks like that. Oh aaargh. I’m just glad everything is working fine for now. It’s all a mystery to me, why these computers work sometimes and sometimes they don’t, it’s all like smoke and mirrors, or magic.
Restaurant Hotel Saxonburg, Saxonburg, Pennsylvania
How lucky can you get? Just next door to the Mainstay in Saxonburg is the Hote Saxonburg, which has a restaurant, and that restaurant has a menu full of good choices. We ate lunch there, two days in a row. We thought the food was super good, but it may also have to do with eating meals with good friends; everything just tastes good when you are laughing and having fun.
Inside, the owner told us when renovating, they found these old beams, and the original straw and wattle construction, and they decided to leave it – it really adds to the interior atmoshpere:
The food was really good, and the restaurant staff was very accomodating about our picky style of ordering. They had two sandwiches, a Reuben, made with corned beef and sauerkraut, and a Rachel, made with turkey breast and cold slaw. I asked if I could have the Reuben, but made with turkey breast, and they did it as if it were no inconvenience at all. I love it when a restaurant treats my requests with respect, instead of huffing and puffing about how no, it isn’t possible.
Before we started, we ordered cups of the Lobster Bisque, which I am sad to say was so delicious that we ate it all up before even thinking about taking a photo.
My Reuben/Rachel:
What you can’t see much of on our plates is the green beans with pecans; you can’t see them because they disappeared so fast. As good as our meals were, those green beans with pecans were divine.
The Ahi Nicoise Salad (YUM!):
The Pork Barbecue (AdventureMan)
A shrimp and fish dish:
One big guy among us ordered both the spinach salad and the sausage sandwich, and ate every bite, they were both so delicious:
The food was so good, we could only drink coffee afterwards, no room for dessert!
Richard’s BBQ in Birmingham, Alabama
The iPhone was made for road trips. We used to kid each other “if we had an iPhone right now, we could look up . . . ” and now we have one and we do!
It got us flawlessly to the Marriott Residence Inns we favor, even those hidden away, miles from the interstates.
We also found we could enter “BBQ restaurant off I-459 Birmingham” and Boom! There it would be! We found Richard’s that way, and it was our favorite kind of place, not a chain, and full of people who live and work in the area.
This is what it looks like inside, and although there is a train that runs around the top of the restaurant, it is not a noisy train, and after a while, you don’t even notice it.
The food was excellent. I had the barbecued Grouper – and my first ever fried green tomatoes. I discovered I love fried green tomatoes.
AdventureMan had ‘vegetables.’ For strict vegetarians, warning: ‘vegetables’ in The South often contain shreds of meat, and meat fat, usually pork:
We resisted the desserts, but barely . . .
Gotta love those iPhones!
Here are some excerpts from the menu:
Prices were great, service was excellent. When I first ordered, I was told that they were already out of fried green tomatoes, so I ordered the grilled asparagus, and got another sorry, they were out of that, too. I ordered something else – I don’t know what – and when the food came – I had fried green tomatoes! It’s a miracle!
AdventureMan’s New Adventure: Cinco de Mayo
When he ‘retired,’ AdventureMan chose Thursdays as his day to cook. It’s worked out well. Recently, he has perfected Naan, baked on our grill. We’ve had it several times – it just tastes so good, fresh off the grill, and he bastes it with either olive oil and garlic, or olive oil and sesame seeds. Oh, yummmmmm.
“I’m feeling stressed,” he admitted yesterday morning. “It’s my day to cook and I don’t have any ideas.”
“It’s also Cinco de Mayo,” I said, and that was all I had to say, he was off and running.
All I can say is BRAVO. BRAVO, AdventureMan, Cinco de Mayo was a taste treat. They were fabulous.
He found his recipe on AllRecipes.com, and made it pretty much just as they said to make it, serving it with a small bowl of home-made pico de gallo and a small bowl of sour cream. Oh YUMMMM. This is the recipe he used:
Pico de Gallo Chicken Quesadillas
By: Tony Cortez
Ingredients
2 tomatoes, diced
1 onion, finely chopped
2 limes, juiced
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced
salt and pepper to taste
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
2 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves – cut into strips
1/2 onion, thinly sliced
1 green bell pepper, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
4 (12 inch) flour tortillas
1 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese
1/4 cup sour cream, for topping
Directions
In a small bowl, combine tomatoes, onion, lime juice, cilantro, jalapeno, salt and pepper. Set aside. (This is the pico de gallo)
In a large skillet, heat 1 tablespoon olive oil. Add chicken and saute until cooked through and juices run clear. Remove chicken from skillet and set aside.
Put the remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil in the hot skillet and saute the sliced onion and green pepper until tender. Stir in the minced garlic and saute until the aroma is strong. Mix in half of the pico de gallo and chicken breast meat. Set aside; keep warm.
In a heavy skillet, heat one flour tortilla. Spread 1/4 cup shredded cheese on the tortilla and top with 1/2 the chicken mixture. Sprinkle another 1/4 cup cheese over the chicken and top with another tortilla. When bottom tortilla is lightly brown and cheese has started to melt, flip quesadilla and cook on the opposite side. Remove quesadilla from skillet and cut into quarters.
Repeat with remaining ingredients. Serve quesadillas with sour cream and remaining pico de gallo.
I’ve never seen him so happy as he has been the last couple months.
The Crab Trap – Pensacola
We’ve talked about stopping by the Crab Trap forever – but usually, we are on our way home from Joe Patti’s with fresh fish, shrimp, oysters, etc and can’t stop. 🙂
So we made a plan. And we finally got there. We were extra hungry, so we got there early, but not TOO early. Although it was not even 11:30, many of the outside tables were already taken. They have a great view, and a great outdoor eating area to capture the view:
AdventureMan won the first round with his fresh Apalachicola oysters. He ordered a half dozen, and 7 arrived, fresh and sweet:
My crab cake had a fabulous sauce, but the crab cake itself was only ho-hum. On the other hand, I am very hard on crab cakes, I like them to be mostly crab, and TASTY crab, not tasteless crab, and horrors, not crab with a K, that fake stuff that is really some anonymous fish with crab flavoring, oh no, oh no!
We were both underwhelmed with our main courses. AdventureMan ordered the Mate’s Plate, grilled shrimp, oysters and fish. When it arrived, we looked at it in dismay – it looked like something you pull out of the freezer and microwave:
My St. Joe’s Seafood Salad sounded really good, with fresh shrimp, scallops, crab and oysters on top, and it looked really good, but only the shrimp had any taste. The fried oysters were tasteless, as was the crab. Even the tomatoes had little taste. Their bacon vinaigrette was just OK.
I sneaked this photo of a neighbor’s Jambalaya – that Jambalaya looked REALLY good, and came with two sides. The people having Jambalaya were really chowing down – and looking like they were having a good time. If we ever go back, we know what we will try:
The place was packed. We may have just chosen the wrong things on the menu. I have to guess that most of the people were there for the outside dining and the view. It looks like they also have live music some evenings.
Chew Your Juice
“But we only drink REAL orange juice!” I protested to my friend. “We only buy orange juice squeezed from real oranges, not juice drink, or orange juice from concentrate!”
“Have you read the sugar content on the lable?” she asked quietly.
I grabbed the carton and started reading. Oh. Holy cow. 22 grams of sugar in one serving.
“There is nothing wrong with juice,” my friend added, “but chew your juice.”
” ? ? ? ”
“Eat whole fruit. That way you get all the good stuff, the skin, the vitamins and the fiber as well as the juice. Better for you.”
Sigh. Another habit to break and replace with a newer, better, healthier habit. No more juice.
Hmmm. Now I wonder about my hot-weather addiction, McDonald’s wild berry smoothies. I don’t think I want to know how many grams of sugar per serving . . . .
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