terrene: spring menu

by now, most of you know that we're big fans of terrene, so when we found out about their new spring menu, we got our butts over there for some eats.  rest assured, though, that our assessment is in no way biased.

mission:

terrene

central west end

personnel:

we've written extensively about terrene's staff before, but we want to relate to you our most recent experience.  as usual, we perched at the bar for our early-evening dinner, and we had a nice conversation with our favorite bartender john.  another familiar face brought us our first dish, and after chatting with him a bit, we discovered that the man we've exchanged pleasantries with upwards of 30 times is actually the owner (his name is john, too). we've always been fond of him, but now we're even more impressed because he doesn't feel compelled to flaunt his ownership.  very cool.  even cooler?  he asked us to give him our candid impressions of terrene's newest vegetarian options.  he sincerely wanted to know if the food was to our liking and if there was anything they could do to improve it.  as it turns out, and this should come as no surprise, the food didn't need any improvements.

rations:

the spring menu doesn't radically depart from winter's offering, but there are some significant additions and subtractions.  (we're including a snippet from the new menu, as terrene has yet to post it to their website.)  gone is the wild mushroom flatbread; in its place is a chicken flatbread.  now, obviously, we vegetarians want no part of this chicken, but we took advantage of our circumstances and encouraged john to consider using match's chicken substitute.  considering terrene has been using match for quite some time, and considering john's willingness to embrace all things local, we wouldn't be surprised at all to see a vegetarian "chicken" flatbread sometime soon.

a sidebar: if you visit terrene soon, it wouldn't hurt if you requested the match "chicken," too.

gone, too, are the gnocchi, which have been replaced by the stuffed grape leaves as the new "small plate" vegetarian option (you'll have to wait til summer to see the tofu tacos again).  the delicately-wrapped grape leaves are filled with sundried tomato and kalamata tapenade, and cous cous replaces the oft-seen brown rice as the starchy stuffing.  the stuffed grape leaves tasted "clean" and made us feel light.  the yogurt sauce provided some nice tang, too, and we really enjoyed the cucumber and watercress salad.  we just wish more restaurants would use watercress.  it's so underused.

next up was the new vegetarian option on the "big plate" menu: vegetarian pasta.  this pasta is the replacement for the sublime vegetarian meatloaf--a dish we will sorely miss until next winter--so we were a bit skeptical when we ordered the pasta.  though no match (bad pun intended) for the meatloaf, the pasta was exceptionally good. 

assessment:

a- (a "minus" primarily because of price)

vegetarian-friendly assessment:

a