Lunch at Devon on Rittenhouse Square
Posted: April 7th, 2009 | Author: Bone | Filed under: Food, Philadelphia | Tags: devon, Food, Philadelphia | No Comments »
I know, 3 food posts in a row, it’s like I’m obsessed!
It was raining pretty hard today (after I went in for the morning meeting and walked back I had to get changed because I got soaked, even through my raincoat), so I decided that ‘posh lunch Monday’ would definitely see me sticking close to home and just going to the other side of the square. The lady that runs the store my landlady owns gave me a coupon for $10 off at lunch at Devon (or $20 at dinner, but dinner on your own is a bit sad), which is primarily a seafood restaurant. I asked my waitress if there was a minimum I had to spend, and she said there wasn’t, so I guess I could have gone in there, drank water, and ordered one of their cheaper entrees, and left pretty much only giving a tip (what’s 10-20% of $0?). As you’d assume I didn’t do that, because I don’t think it’s fair to the restaurant, and so used it as an opportunity to have one of their expensive dishes at an average price. the beer in the picture above is Blue Moon, it tastes a bit like Hoegarden and was really nice, kinda fruity.
Unusually, very unsually I guess since it’s never happened to me, instead of getting a bread roll on your side plate, I got a scone. A scone! It was actually pretty good too, obviously not a patch on Mum’s, but still pretty impressive since considering I was in a restaurant and in a country where I’d always presumed I’d have to smile politely if I ever had to suffer their attempts at a scone.
Here’s the main course, a mixed seafood grill. Let’s work from left to right; yukon mashed potatoes with the skins on (yeah, mashed potatoes with various types of fish, it was odd, but they were good potatoes), grilled salmon, a couple of prawns, there’s a scallop nestled inside the prawns, they’re on a salsa bed, and out of shot there was some lobster and sauteed spinach. They were all good, but I wasn’t particularly amazed, there wasn’t really any zazz to the dish, which is what I’ve come to expect of my posh lunches. I’d actually go there for a non-posh lunch if I wasn’t on my own, it was all pretty reasonably priced, and the atmosphere was a lot more relaxing, I usually feel a bit out of place at the upmarket places, even though I’m usually dressed better than half the other diners, but I was comfortable here.
I had told myself that I wasn’t going to get dessert, but then when my waitress (who was pretty much the best waitress I’ve ever had, she very much deserved her tip) told me they had real key lime pie (meaning it wasn’t green), and since I’ve never had key lime pie before I decided that I should try it, and make as well try the real thing. You know what, I like key limes! It was kind of lemon-y, but without the bitterness that you usually get with a citron tart, I don’t know if that’s because of the fruit itself or because it was laced with sugar, but either way it was good.
And with that, I paid my bill and made my way back across the square, still managing to get pretty wet even though it’s only a couple of hundred metres.