Half Moon Bay - Part 2 - Dinner

For dinner, we ended up going with the tasting menu. I think I convinced Dave to have it with me since he was afraid it would be too much food. Since the theme was squashes/pumpkins for each course and I had been craving pumpkin items for awhile now, we ended up going with the tasting menu. I forgot exactly what was listed on the menu, so I'll have to go by what I remember when describing the courses.

The first course was a tuna sashimi on top of 2 types of kabocha squash (one was diced and the other was sliced) and a coconut gelee. Overall, this course was okay. Together, all the ingredients tasted good, but we agreed that it needed more citrus. When the dish came out, we were surprised that it was sashimi, and Dave reminded me that I'm not supposed to eat it. I think he just wanted more tuna on his plate, but I tried some of it and gave one of my tuna slices to him.

This was an "open" squash ravioli in a brown butter and honey sauce. There was also some caramelized bits of something on top. I enjoyed this dish a lot, but the honey taste was very strong. Unfortunately, Dave doesn't like honey, but he still ate every last bit of it. The caramelized bits got stuck in our teeth, which were kind of annoying.
This course was monkfish on top of sunchoke puree and a squash marshmallow on top. The sauce also had pumpkin seeds in it. There were actually 2 pieces of it, but we had both started eating it before we realized we had missed the photo op. At this point of the meal, this was our favorite course. It had the right sweet/savory balance.

This course was described as a crispy Iowa pork. For some reason, I had pictured a nice piece of pork belly. I was surprised to get a croquette of pork. It was on top of some pickled cabbage and some squash sauce that was kind of like ketchup. This course tasted good, but the texture of the croquette wasn't great so it kind of killed the dish.

This was definitely the highlight of the meal. It was a sirloin on top of butternut squash "noodles" on top of a red curry sauce. The meat and sauce were delicious. The butternut squash was a bit too salty and Dave kept thinking that the texture should be like real noodles. I ate everything on my plate, while Dave left a pile of noodles.

The next course was a palette cleanser of a pumpkin soda float with pumpkin ice cream. It was really small and we finished it before realizing we didn't take a photo. The pumpkin ice cream wasn't as good as the ice cream we had at the festival.

Luckily the finale of dinner was one of my favorite parts of the meal. It was a pumpkin panna cotta with a side of cinnamon ice cream and a cranberry/granola.

For petit fours, we got a box of chocolates as well as a chocolate truffle, a fruit jelly and a mini pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting. Obviously we ate the petit fours before taking a photo.

After the long meal, we are full and happy. (See the empty plate in the middle? That's where the petit fours were.)
After this day/meal, my craving for pumpkin anything has been thoroughly satisfied. One of the fun parts of the meal was that David was facing the open kitchen so we could tell when our food was coming out. We were also able to hear the orders go in and figure out what was the most popular item on the menu.

Since we had such a long dinner, we didn't hit any traffic on our way home, which was great. When we got home, we ended up going to bed almost immediately even though it was only about 9 PM. A long fun day had tired us out!