Palate Food and Wine review = yum!

Last night I went out with the girlfriend to a newish spot I've been wanting to try for a while: Palate Food and Wine in Glendale. I heard some great things about this place but was a little skeptical because it was in Glendale. For those of you unfamiliar with Glendale--think of it as every generic suburb rolled into one. In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if the second best restaurant in Glendale was the Oliver Garden.

However, in the most polite and respectful way possible, Palate ended up slapping me across the face, calling me a d-bag and sending a clear message that Glendale should be taken seriously. Ok, the place was the only business on its street that didn't sell cars, but it had some amazing food. Credit goes to chefs Octavio Becerra and Gary Menes.

We started with a bottle of wine and I decided to go with Château de la Liquière Faugères Vieilles Vignes 2007 because I was completely overwhelmed by the wine list and it said this one was organic and I thought that would be cool. It was also from the Rhone region and so I thought it might have some cabernet sauvingon in it. We were sharing the table with a couple of dudes who seemed to be working their way through the entire menu and it turned out one of them was a sommelier and he very politely pointed out that Rhone wines are, in fact, granache and syrah...I think...and that organic wine often tastes like dirt. Score. Our wine came and it was pretty good, not too dirt-like and much cheaper than the $150 dollar bottle the Sommelier was drinking. So suck on that. I should also quickly mention that all the wines offered are for sale at a shop thats part of the restaurant complex.

Next came the food. We started with the fall caponata. A caponata is, according to wikipedia, "a Sicilian augergine dish, a cooked vegetable salad made from chopped fried aubergine and celery seasoned with sweetened vinegar, and capers in a sweet sour sauce". It was tasty and made up of a lot of vegetables that I woudn't normally eat but that were actually pretty yummy and the flavors all blended together nicely. This dish also clued me into what I believe is the theme of Palate, at least for me, which is balance. Especially in terms of flavor, but I think both sides of the restaurant probably weighed about the same too.

Note: my plan was to refer to the online menu as I write this and I just discovered that its not the same as the one we had last night. So bear with me as the rest of the dishes I will be forced to describe from memory. We had a potato and mushroom soup that was unfairly tasty. I could eat it every day: creamy, savory and the mushrooms burst in your mouth with an earthy saltiness. The best part was the presentation: a bowl was placed on the table with a small portion of mushrooms. The waiter was literally, like "yo there's your soup". We were like "uh...... what?" and he was like "its soup" and then sort of started giggling. I looked at my girl and I think both shared the same thought: "this soup is bullshit". Then the waiter cracked up and pulled a caraffe of soup from like out his ass and poured it on the mushrooms. We all shared a big laugh. And then devoured the soup.

After the soup came the rest of the meal: gnocchi with sugar snap peas and pork cheek, winter vegetables wrapped in parchment and pork belly with blood oranges. The highlight for both of us was the gnocchi. Both the pork cheek and the gnocchi melted in your mouth and the saltiness of the pork was perfectly balanced by the sweetness of the snap peas. Nothing was overwhelming and the sauce was so delicious I asked for more bread to sop it up. The vegetables were fine, nothing to write home about, but very fresh and well cooked. The best part about those was that they came sealed up in a parchment pouch that had to be cut open, which our waiter also loved doing. My gf was feeling full when we got to the Pork Belly but I loved it. Once again the saltiness of the park had a perfect compliment in the sweetness and tartness of the blood orange. Well done. Delicious. Bravo. I wanted to try and give the chef a handjob but thought better of it.

After the meal, we got some apple tart which was also awesome and tasted like, well, really awesome apple tart. Also our waiter, who was pretentious and French but awesomely so, gave us a healthy free pour of some fancy dessert wine form 1989 since we had been getting slow service because our tablemates were being fawned over due to their sommelier status. The 89 wine blew my mind. Sweet, nutty, balanced. Delicioius.

This was one of the wines our sommeliar tablemate had been drinking and he said it was pretty special. We ended up chatting with him and his friends through a lot of the meal. They were super friendly and helped contribute to a great atmosphere.

A fantastic meal overall made even better when our tablemates called Charlie Day from Its Always Sunny in Philadlephia over to our table. He had been sitting behind us all night and I had been content to whisper loudly to my girlfriend "Hey! Hey! Its Charlie Day! Right behind us! And that girl who plays the girl he likes on the show! Right THERE! Behind you! Should I talk to him? I'm gonna. No thats tacky. Should I?" At any rate, before I got punched in the face, Charlie was over by our table and we gave him a shy "we love your show" and he started talking about how he might include a flashback un the upcoming season giving insight into how his character become such a huge asstard. More awesomeness.

So in summation. Palate has awesome food. Try a non organic wine. Try and sit next to an awesome down to earth sommelier dude. Charlie Day is the man.