Blossom

Despite the fact that it was an evening of bad ordering on my part, I had a great dinner at Blossom in Chelsea. The place doesn't have that crunchy-granola atmosphere that you find at a lot of vegan restaurants. Despite being right on 9th Avenue, it felt very private and tucked away. It as quiet and dark but with a lot of candles, and the tables weren't too close together.

For an appetizer we had the South Asian Lumpia, which was delicious. It was like a really good samosa with seitan inside.

For an entree I ordered the porcini filet. It was okay, but not great. It didn't have any really distinct flavor other than "salty," which I think was because it just had too much gravy. The mashed potatoes were good, but again covered in too much gravy. The porcini filet is on the left in the picture (see all that gravy?). On the right is the "savory seitan & herb potatoes." I had a couple of bites of this, and it was delicious. The seitan's texture was great, the potatoes were little roasted cubes with lots of flavor, the green beans tasted really fresh, and the whole dish had a wonderful garlic flavor. If I go back to Blossom, I would definitely order this.




I made another mistake ordering dessert. After much debate, we decided on the chocolate ganache torte, at my insistence. It looks good, but it was very bland...it tasted like two-day old cake made from a cake mix with hot fudge from a jar. Even the ice cream wasn't very good. For the rest of the night, all I could think was that I wished I'd ordered the berry tarte.