rev:text
| - I guess when you're a vegan restaurant it's important that people know you're a vegan restaurant. You know...so the vegans know how to find you. And...bear with me here...that makes sense. But Apteka isn't a good vegan restaurant. Or...perhaps it's more accurate to say instead, Apteka isn't JUST a good VEGAN restaurant. It's a good restaurant. Yeah...there's no meat on the menu. Or...you know...dairy or eggs or fish and stuff.
So I suppose if you're dining with someone that REQUIRES meat. Like...like Count Dracula for example. If you and the Count are dining, this is a bad selection. But apart from Count Dracula, or other people...like those too hidebound to attempt something with the "Vegan" label...this is a good restaurant. No additional qualifiers required.
Secondly...I sampled four cocktails from their bar. All from the menu (before you think, ugh, Jesus, Jim, not another drunk review...one of the drinks was just a taste of my date's drink). And they were each better than the last. REALLY well balanced nicely thought out drinks. Can't really go wrong.
The pierogies were excellent. The tartines were superb. The Boczniaki z kapusta was good, not great...the cabbage was a little clunky to eat. It resisted my efforts to cut it into mouthful sized pieces. The flavors were nice though. We capped our evening with the "special sandwich". We just saw it pass our table too many times not to give it a try. It didn't disappoint.
Our server was a menacing looking fellow all betatted and armful with a perpetual scowl. Which sounds like a bad thing, but if you asked him a question he would just light up like a kid at christmas and tell you ALL THE THINGS, beaming and gushing and very knowledgable and the contrast was so friggin' delightful that I kept asking him stuff to watch him transform over and over from menacing to kid-at-christmas and back again.
Probably the biggest criticism I have to the place is that it's lit in a way that is not conducive to artful pictures. You know we MUST have pictures of our food. And no matter which way we positioned glasses or seats or plates...there was always some weird shadow.
Work on it, Apteka. The people must post.
Anyway...I'll be back. Meat or no meat.
|