Bar None

 

On Friday I met a friend for lunch at an oddity in our area full of standard restaurants. We were at a Russian-owned crepe house, with not only create-your-own crepes but also a menu with pages and pages (6? 8?) of teas.

          I’m a tea drinker, so it’s definitely a happy place for me but their crepes are fun, too. I chose fillings of lox, asparagus, mushrooms, and spinach for mine. The crepe wrapping everything up is so thin you could probably read through it, but the end product of even a ‘small’ is massive. The rest of the menu is reminiscent of a New Jersey diner’s with endless choices like perhaps a ‘flight’ of 6 pancakes – including beet, potato, and zucchini – or maybe you’d rather aim toward the dinner part of the day with beef shish ka bobs.

          We swore we couldn’t eat another bite and then of course opted to build a dessert
crepe to share, choosing a filling of strawberries, blueberries, puffy cream cheese, and warm chocolate.

          It has an interesting layout, too. Aside from the dining area with tables and chairs, you first pass through another with three groupings of twin couches facing each other, where some people had chosen to sit, their food on the coffee table before them.

          The two areas are divided by a long bar, so I asked our waitress for a menu of cocktails, thinking maybe we’d want to return for dinner sometime. I knew the place was open until 1:00 a.m. and imagined a lively bar scene, everyone relaxing on those couches while they chatted.

          She smiled and said no, they did not have a liquor license and the bar only served tea.