Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Downtown Saloon Fort Lauderdale

A1A Marathon/Half: 5th post about the race and our trip
You can keep scrolling down for more!

Marathon weekend, on Friday evening we met at the Downtowner Saloon, on a canal across from City Walk in Fort Lauderdale. (Smoke-free, except on the patio)

Fantastic thing: while we were there we saw the televised men's curling team WINNING a game. Curling has become one of my favorite spectator sports of the Olympics.


Restaurant food selection is tricky if you don't want to eat gluten. Yesterday I heard that Canada's favorite pass-time is hockey; for the US, the favorite pass-time is deep fried.

From southern California to New York, "deep fried" appetizers are on menus of "good" restaurants. Sometimes those are the only choices.
Downtowner's menu looked pretty reasonable.

Anyway, here is what they had, and behold, appetizers that looked interesting and NOT deep-fried. (You can click to enlarge.)


Sweet Don and our super waitress came up with three appetizers we could share. One was tomato mozzarella stack: fresh tomato and buffalo mozzarella slices with a balsamic drizzle and topped with a sprig of basil.


He served me the top slices of the stack.
The other appetizers were seared tuna (5 pieces to share) and potato skins (one for each of us). Amazingly, the potato skins were not greasy.
All three items were delicious.


Here we all are, through the glass, to protect the innocent!



We are back to running now, the next big race in mind.
Yesterday we ran in the park. The temp was above freezing, but where we were the wind was pretty sharp.
This warmer week is most welcome, but there will be more indoor runs this month.

3 comments:

Anne said...

Even though Florida isn't considered The South, I guess southern cooking - all fat, all the time - is apparently a tradition there. Glad you eventually found some dishes you could eat.

Sunshine said...

These appetizers were certainly not "all fat all the time".
They look amazingly more like real food. Even the potato skins were the leanest ones I've ever seen. And yes they had salads on another page of the menu.

Most appetizer menus I've seen are pretty much all deep fried.
I'm sure you can find less fat in CA... but only in certain
restaurants.

Although food in deep South is higher fat, the joke about America's pass-time being deep fried is not about the South.

peter said...

Mmm, now I'm hungry!

It has finally started to warm up around here and become ideal running weather.