Sunday Dinner @ City House - Pork Snacks!

Hi! I'm pretty excited about this post, because I get to write about pork snacks and various offal. This is not a post for those with a fear of the swine or the parts of the animal that you don't normally consume.

Dru's parents took us to dinner on Sunday night for our birthdays at City House, where we sat out on the patio...beautiful summer evening with a multi-course meal to work through. If you are not familiar with City House, it is a great restaurant in Germantown with a modern-Italian flair. Every Sunday night, they do a custom menu with "pork snacks" and various experimental dishes. I enjoy eating with Dru's family, because they (especially her Dad) have a healthy appetite and like a WIDE variety of food (just like me).

We started the meal with one plate of each pork snack:

• Ciccioli sliders
• Braised pork belly
• Sausage stuffed pepper with pecorino
• Crispy pig ears with wing sauce

Wow! All four were great. Ciccioli, which I had never had or heard of before, is pounded pork meat and skin fat, with a consistency something like pulled pork. The sliders came on little sweet steamed buns and yellow mustard. The flavor was very much like a rich pulled pork sandwich.

The pork belly was a little chunk that had been braised, so a lot of the fat and tissue had been rendered out. For those that don't know, bacon is smoked and thinly sliced pork belly...think of a cube of that meat about 2 inches on a side. This was a little, tender, fatty chunk of delicious.

The stuffed pepper was also great, but was very tame and conventional compared to the other three dishes.

Finally, the pig ears were incredible! They were very clearly fried ears, but smaller than you would expect. They were rich and wonderful, especially with spicy wing sauce for dipping and celery sticks on the side. As Dru says, you could fry anything with hot sauce and it would be good. We have bought rawhide pig ears for the dogs before, which are these enormous flaps, so we were expecting big ol' chunks. The ears at City House were much more petite...maybe two or three bites each. I really wish I had pictures, but we didn't document until the next course, which was...

Pizzas!

• Pizza with Manila clams and marinara
• Pizza with salt cod and potatoes

Both pizzas were quite good, though the general consensus at the table was that the clam pizza was better. The clams are cooked right on the pie, and they specifically did not cut it before serving because they did not want the clams' liquor to flow off the pizza.

Plus...

• Fried squash blossoms
• Lamb's tongue with mashed potatoes

Now, the lamb's tongue is shown above. To the untrained eye (i.e., mine), it kind of looked like a well-done pancake served over mashed potatoes. I have had raw beef tongue several times and enjoyed it immensely, so I was looking forward to this delicacy. The tongue was seared and was actually quite good, though it had a very fibrous consistency. That is, it was very difficult to cut and it wanted to come apart along the grain of the muscle, but the taste and feel of the meat was succulent and smooth.

All in all, our waitress was pretty excited that we were ordering all of these things that most people wouldn't touch. I don't want anyone to think that City House is focused on fringe food items, because they really aren't. Even on this "experimental" night, there were a number of things on the menu that you might find at any nice restaurant.

All in all, City House gets four big thumbs up from us. The first two times that we ate there, the food was way too salty, but they seem to have corrected that...everything was well balanced, with the exception of the salt cod, which you (obviously) would expect to be very salty.

Our next post will probably be from San Francisco, where we are traveling for the 4th of July weekend. Foodie prospects: excellent!