Good Eats Cafe

Yesterday afternoon the better-half, I and a couple of friends made the drive to Kinsale, VA to eat at the Good Eats Cafe. The cafe is a converted gas station and the seating is limited. When the better-half called earlier in the week, he was told that reservations are only accepted for parties of 8 or more and that we should get there early since they expected to be busy on Saturday as the restaurant down the road was going to be closed for a private party. We arrived at 5:30 and were seated promptly. The cafe is only open Thursday-Sunday and the hours are limited to 5pm-9pm. The food is worth the hour and fifteen minute drive.

We started with cocktails, crab pot stickers and cheese panatelas. The crab pot stickers were crab dumplings served with a sauce that is made on site and is just called the crab dressing. We put on our food detective hats and have decided there’s curry in the dressing as well as mustard and other ingredients that remain mysterious. Spicy and very good. The cheese panatelas were fried wontons that were flavored with cinnamon and filled with a mild cheese. The dipping sauce for those was a sweet Cuban barbeque sauce. I couldn’t begin to figure out what was in the sauce but it was dark and sweet.

We each had a cafe salad with three of us opting for the sesame tahini dressing and the better-half opted for the parmesan peppercorn dressing. The salads were fresh but pretty standard and the dressings were made on site.

The entree menu is heavy on the seafood (as should be expected given Kinsale’s location) but there was the usual steak and chicken items. The specials list was all seafood. My friend and I ordered from the specials list. She ordered flounder with backfin crab and I ordered the soft-shell crabs. The other orders rounding out the table were the crab cakes and Mediterranean tuna. The crab cakes and the tuna were very good. When I saw that the tuna came with a mixture of pine nuts and capers, I leaned over to the better-half and said you’re going to get that right? He did because he’s a sucker for pine nuts and capers.

The star of the table was the flounder and I am unable to tell you what the waitress told us about the sauce for the flounder. It was excellent. We all snitched pieces from my friend’s plate. Only my flounder-eating friend wanted a piece of soft-shell crab and so I happily ate all three crabs. That’s the bonus of ordering soft-shell crab not many people want to taste it. I love every crunchy, gooey bite. All dishes came with a medley of fresh vegetables, a choice of jasmine rice, roasted potatoes or french fries. Two of us opted for the jasmine rice (which the better-half said had hard cheese flecks mixed in) and two of us opted for the fries which were dressed with the right amount of salt.

We all opted for dessert. I ordered the chocolate ice cream and I’d be surprised if it was anything other than something we could all buy at the neighborhood grocery store, but I like that so it was OK with me. The other options were a key lime pie which was reportedly excellent and a chocolate peanut butter pie which was eaten quickly. One of us ordered the happy coffee and the happy ingredient in our table’s coffee was kahlua.

After dinner, they don’t let you linger, it was still light so we drove down to Lewisetta so I could show our friends were my grandparents used to live (a pretty prime piece of waterfront) and the old schoolhouse that my family bought and began the renovations. I have to say that subsequent exterior renovations have really finished the place off. My family saved the building from being torched. The local fire department had plans to practice their skills on the schoolhouse. I learned a lot of my mad skillz working on that house.

I can honestly tell you I will never pull asphalt shingles off a house and then pile them into the back of a Gremlin to be hauled to the dump again. Now that I have my own monetary resources, I’ll pay someone else to rip shingles off the sides off a house and haul them to the dump in their own Gremlin.