Traif

I celebrated the first night of Hanukkah 2014 as any good Catholic girl would… by visiting a restaurant named Traif (which is the opposite of ‘kosher’).

The menu changes constantly, so please bear with me while I try to recall all the specific details of each dish. I can tell you – spoiler alert – that I fully enjoyed nearly every dish we had, which is the sole reason I’m posting something 5 months after the fact.

An amuse sent out for us while we browsed our menus – I thought this was okay. I believe maple parsnip or carrot puree…

A lovely winter salad with beets, greens, and a lovely sweetness to it that I enjoyed. I don’t believe Guacamoleyes enjoyed it quite as much as I do, though we both liked it.

A very interesting riff on fried chicken, biscuit and gravy – fried quail with a biscuit and some ridiculously rich, wonderful gravy over a biscuit… I would lick the plate if I wasn’t raised not to do such things (in public; at home all bets are off!). The fried quail was wonderfully twee but delicious, with crispy bits and tender, succulent meat to tear into with my tiny bottom front teeth, haha. This was an absolutely delicious dish that we both thoroughly enjoyed!

Sliders which were great, with pretty good sweet potato fries. I don’t recall the full details about the sliders, but I know we both seriously considered ordering another plate just so we could have more. I think that means it’s safe to assume we liked it a lot!

I was happy to be able to introduce Guacamoleyes to sweetbreads, though these weren’t the best by a long shot – they were slightly chalky, one of my biggest grievances with sweetbreads sometimes. Outside of that, the rest of the dish was good, though not amazing… and I didn’t awaken any passion in her for sweetbreads. Ah well.

Though this dish was super hard to cut and hard to see, I remember we both loved it – pork belly (whole) with apples and other sweet little drizzles and dollops all over it. I wished it was sliced for us – it was really hard to cut, and not all of the fat was rendered – but it was tender, fatty, delicious… with the sweetness of the little drizzly dollops cutting through the fat nicely and accenting its savoriness.

While it’s true, I don’t fully remember all of the details of our meal, I do remember leaving very happily stuffed and satisfied. We were both very pleased with the food and I will likely return at some point.