Last year, my friends and I went to Morimoto for dinner. We wanted to do something like that again this year, so a few days ago we went to one of Jose Garces restaurants, Amada. I had been to Tinto, another Garces establishment, around Thanksgiving — so my expectations were high. I wasn’t disappointed: we all had a great meal.
Due to some unexpected traffic, most of our party arrived late — in fact, only my brother and my friend John managed to actually make the 8:15 reservation. The remaining four of us got there twenty minutes later. Our waiter seated Sam and John and chatted with them amicably while they sipped on drinks from the bar; if anybody was displeased by our tardiness, it didn’t show even though the restaurant was quite full.
Amada is a tapas restaurant. Everything on the (rather extensive) menu is a relatively small portion — fit to be shared among three people or so — even the dishes that sound like they might be entrees. The sheer variety of the menu might be overwhelming for some, but a chef’s tasting menu is offered. Tasting menus are my preference normally, and given the breadth of the menu everybody else agreed that it would be the best way to experience the restaurant, so that’s what we ordered. The staff was very gracious about considerations for Emily, our local vegetarian, and about accommodating special requests such as my brother’s desire for the flatbread course to be a specific item from the menu.
The restaurant was well-lit and the decor — at least from our vantage point — muted. It lacked the rugged, earthy look of Tinto, but I appreciated the simplicity and the fact that it was brighter. It was fairly loud, however.
The food was delivered in three courses with several dishes per course that all arrived one after another. There was a brief pause between each course, during which our table was cleared and we were given some breathing room. We ate a lot of food:
- White anchovies with pine nuts and olive oil
- Serrano ham and fig salad
- Aged manchego cheese with truffled lavender honey
- Iberian ham
- Aragones cheese with white sangria honey and raisins
- Spanish octopus with potato medallions
- Cadi ureglia cheese with a chocolate hazelnut puree
- Oysters, strawberry escabeche and cava granita
- Garlic shrimp
- Beef shortrib flatbread with horseradish and parmesan
- Roasted peppers, stuffed with crab and roasted almonds
- Roasted artichoke hearts with shaved parmesan cheese
- Green salad with asparagus and fava beans
- An assortment of seasonal wild mushrooms, seared off
- Lamb chops stuffed with goat cheese and romesco sauce
- Spicy seared prawns
- Lamb meatballs with shaved manchego cheese
- Sirloin with goat cheese mousse and wilted spinach, with a fig sauce
- Caramelized dark chocolate custard with a berry sorbet
- Fried vanilla ice cream, hazelnut sauce and hazelnut ice cream
Almost everything was excellent. I didn’t care for either of the lamb dishes, however — the meatballs felt a bit too rich and the chop had a very uncomfortable, almost metallic aftertaste. I’m fairly certain my friends all agreed that the chop was the worst plate of the night. The pick for best, however, was nowhere near as easy. The salad with ham and figs was highly praised, as were some of the cheeses and the roasted peppers. I personally enjoyed the oysters and the flatbread the most.
A few of the dishes I found to be overly salty — not to the point of being unappealing, but enough that I noticed the salt as a flavor on its own, rather than as an accent. The prawns and the mushrooms were the prime offenders here. My brother did not agree with me, but he has extremely high tolerance for salt.
Amada claims to be a unique and novel interpretation of tapas — I can’t say if this is true or not, since I haven’t actually been to very many tapas restaurants. But I can say that I really appreciated the straightforward approach the restaurant took with its food. Everything was about the food itself, there wasn’t a lot of reliance on fancy plating or presentation, on trendy ingredients or techniques. The focus was on the tastes of the dishes themselves, and on a perfect atmosphere to share a great meal with good friends.