living up to the hype

A couple weeks ago, D and I took two of our friends to Cyrus for a belated birthday dinner. We'd been telling them all last year about how it was our new favorite restaurant, and how awesome the bread was, and the cheese cart, and the dessert cart, and on and on, ad nauseum.

Naturally, as we approached Healdsburg, I started to psych myself out. Of course the food could not possibly be as good as I'd remembered! What was I thinking?

Luckily for me, it was that good.

We ordered the eight-course menu, but first we were served a plate of five canapes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, & umami, just like last time), followed by a scallop amuse bouche:

There were three scallops; one was raw, one marinated, and one seared, so it was interesting to compare them in both taste and texture.

I'm not going to do a full menu rundown for the rest of the evening, but I do want to mention some of the highlights...

The foie appetizer was seared with pear coulis and lentils:


I think it was just as good as last year's flambe-ed version:


This lobster dish was one of my favorites. It was served with daikon, blood oranges, and tamarind ponzu sauce:


There was an option to add shaved truffles to some of the dishes, so I chose to do so with my chicken. They were quite liberal with the shavings, but I was a bit disappointed with the taste; I felt like the cooked bits of truffle and the truffle oil were much more fragrant than the raw truffle:


The cheese plate was as generous as I'd remembered (more so, because there were four of us). My favorite was an ash-covered Loire Valley goat cheese called "Sainte-Maure de Touraine" which I'd never had before; it's the gooey one in the front right:


Of course, we were too stuffed to eat all of these mignardises, but we did take the rest home. I especially love jelly-like candies, and these were lychee and raspberry-flavored...yum!