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Review of Palapas restaurant in Aptos, California

من طرف: Unknown بتاريخ: 2:24 PM / تعليق : 0



Review of Palapas restaurant in Aptos, California
Palapas may be the best Mexican restaurant in the Santa Cruz area. The food is terrific, the atmosphere is lively, fun and smart, and the staff is great. Here’s an example:


When we ate there, we were at a two-person table right next to a big group – what looked like a multi-family dinner, with fourteen people. They had a nice, long meal, and when they were done, the table was absolutely destroyed. I counted over twenty empty/dirty water glasses, for example. It would have taken me a minimum of half an hour simply to clear that table. Nobody had done anything nefarious, but for a group that big is going to create quite a mess, which there was.
It took the staff at Palapas exactly five minutes to completely repair the damage. It was amazing. I’m always fascinated by watching professionals work. A server, a busser and the hostess, who was wearing a long, tight skirt and really nicely dressed, absolutely attacked the dirty table. Cups, plates and everything else were bussed. Dirty linens were removed. The tables were repositioned to make two smaller tables out of what had been one big one. Fresh linens and silverware appeared. Even the carpet was quickly cleaned up, using a carpet sweeper.
And just like that, the job was done. Two new parties appeared. And the tables were back in action. That’s kind of how this place works. They’re good– and it shows.

The Location

Palapas is in the Seascape Village Shopping Center, right across Sumner Avenue from Seascape Resort. There is lots of free parking, but you are going to have to climb stairs to get into the restaurant, as it’s on the second floor.
Address: 21 Seascape Boulevard, Aptos, California 95003
Phone: (831) 662-9000

The Hours

Dinner nightly from 17:00 until 22:00. Calling and double-checking is highly recommended, however, as hours are not listed anywhere online. In fact, for this nice a place, the website is definitely second-rate, which is unfortunate.

The Ambiance

Nice Mexican tropical. The place is definitely busy, but the big open space is broken up by low white walls, with blue tile embedded in them. The overall look and feel is of a palapa, as the name suggests, which is a Mexican dwelling with a thatched roof but no walls – an open-air hut, really. There is a very lively bar in one corner, and patio dining. The whole place is wrapped in windows, which furthers the impression of openness.

The Price

Not bad — $100 before tip, including a shared appetizer, drinks and a shared dessert.

The Food

The food is great, and really, really fresh. We started with a shared appetizer of Calamari Empanizado – fried calamari with dipping sauce, basically. This was sort of a high-risk choice, because fried calamari is a staple in a lot of restaurant. It’s cheap, it’s easy to make, and it can be absolutely disgusting – oily, heavy, and awful. For instance, I wouldn’t recommend the calamari in the Seattle airport. Interestingly, “Calamari” is an Italian word – the Spanish version of the same thing is “Calamare”. I guess Palapas figured their customers would be familiar with the former, but not with the latter.
Anyway, it was wonderful. Hot, tender, with a substantial amount of calamari – not buried in breading – and delivered with a scoop of Palapas’ wonderful ceviche. The calamari was also tender – often it’s ridiculously overcooked, which gives it the texture of a pencil eraser, but not this dish. Good stuff, and with a beer, a fantastic beginning to a meal.
My entrée was a seafood special – salmon with prawns, in a tomato-based sauce, with beans, rice and a scoop of ceviche. Everything was absolutely fresh, and the dish was amazing. Salmon, in particular, isn’t easy to make correctly – it tends to either be dried out, which can be fine if it’s seasoned properly, or be watery and tasteless. This was neither.
Beth had the other seafood special, which was essentially the same, except made with Mahi-Mahi, and in a sauce based in tomatillo rather than tomato. This description doesn’t really do it justice. Her dish consisted of Hawaiian yellowtail and Hawaiian mahi-mahi with sauteed onions and peppers and a tomatillo sauce topped with jumbo gulf prawns, accompanied by a light and tangy ceviche with rice, beans, guacamole and served, as was mine, with tortillas.
Yum.
Dessert was a fine Key Lime pie. Also great.
Bottom line – a terrific Mexican place, with fresh ingredients, a great staff, a nice beach-y ambience, and really good food. Highly recommended.

Aquarius, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review

من طرف: Unknown بتاريخ: 5:51 PM / تعليق : 0

Review of Aquarius Restaurant at Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz is an unusual town. It has an amazing, and slightly unreal list of world-class things to do and see – the Boardwalk, Big Basin, Monterey Bay, surfing. But it also has a gritty, discouraging underside – an enormous drug problem, an army of homeless people, and the highest crime rate of any city its size in California. Particularly in summer, it’s a dangerous, and frequently unpleasant place


Aquarius kind of represents Santa Cruz at its best. It’s a place that very obviously celebrates the beauty and the greatness here, and holds the ugliness at a comfortable distance. It’s the closest thing Santa Cruz has to genuine elegance. As an example, the dining room overlooks Cowell’s Beach and as you sit there sipping your drink you have a lovely panoramic view of a beach with waves breaking, people walking and so on. However, Cowell’s is also known for being one of the dirtiest beaches in California. The water is filthy, and there are frequently mentally ill, drunk and/or homeless people high on meth congregating under the pier. Aquarius doesn’t reveal that.
Interestingly, it also celebrates Jack O’Neill, who is the closest thing to a legend the city has produced, and one of my personal heroes. O’Neill, who has an enormous beard and an eyepatch, and resembles nothing so much as a kindly pirate, invented the wetsuit, which makes cold-water surfing possible. Using that as a launching pad, he then build O’Neill Sports, a very large and very successful sporting goods company, primarily focused on surfing. To get to Aquarius, you have to pass through the Jack O’Neill Lounge, which is decorated with extensive memorabilia celebrating his life and career. It’s wonderful stuff – a big photo of Jack O’Neill at the wheel of a sailboat will always make me feel better.



The Location

Aquarius is inside the Dream Inn, right at the foot of Santa Cruz’s Municipal Wharf. Although parking here is a pain in the neck in general, if you’re patronizing the restaurant, you can park in a gated lot across the street. Be sure to get your parking ticket validated – if you do, parking is free.
Address: 175 West Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz, California 95060
Telephone: (831) 460-5012

The Hours

  • Sunday – Thursday: 17:30 – 21:30;
  • Friday and Saturday: 17:30 – 22:00

The Ambience

Tasteful, quiet and minimalistic. The décor is simple – tile floors, a few decorative touches, and enormous, floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the beach, the Municipal Wharf, the Boardwalk and Monterey Bay. It’s truly spectacular. Wisely, whoever decorated Aquarius seems to have gotten the message that the best thing to do was to let the outside in, and to not attempt to compete with it. It’s lovely, and tranquil, and beautiful.

The Service

Great. Professional, low-key, prompt and friendly.

The Food

It sort of matches the décor – simple, elegant, unfussy, and expertly done.
The first appetizer was a Caprese salad. Rather than assembling it from a lot of little segments of mozzarella, this offering has a single, pretty substantial ball of mozzarella dressed, surrounded with tomato and lettuce. It worked well, and looked gorgeous – more organized and simple than your usual Caprese.
The other appetizer was half a dozen baked oysters. I love oysters, and the trick to doing them is the breading. It has to have enough flavor to stand up to the strong taste of oyster without simply being mushy. This was great – flavorful, spicy, substantial, but also a good complement to the oysters. A winner, and absolutely beautifully presented.
For an entrée, I had swordfish. I love this dish – a simple, marinated swordfish steak, served on a bed of polenta, and accompanies by a really simply spinach salad on the side, dressed up with avocado. Rather than getting overly fancy, or attempting to create some kind of dreadful monstrosity of a dish, whoever was in the kitchen was smart enough to let simple, first-class ingredients speak for themselves – the steak was perfectly grilled, and simply presented as is.
Beth had the hanger steak, also perfectly done, and thoughtfully presliced, which avoids the challenge of wrestling with a big piece of meat. This came with vegetables, and a nice hit of mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes are the classic American counterpoint to steak, and the key to them is to not attempt to make them anything resembling healthy. A LOT of butter, garlic and seasoning, which is what happened here.
Finally, dessert was a fruit cobbler, which we split, along with decaf coffee. My only issue with the cobbler was that it was very small. It was served in a ramekin, which made it easy to eat, however, and beautiful. Maybe if we hadn’t split this dessert I would not have had this tiny little challenge.
Overall, and in conclusion, Aquarius works like crazy because it focuses on simplicity, and lets the important things – the ocean, the quality of the ingredients, and peace and quiet, do their work. Strongly recommended – among the best in Santa Cruz..
 See Mor Here: Source

Center Street Grill, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review

من طرف: Unknown بتاريخ: 5:35 PM / تعليق : 0

Center Street Grill Restaurant Review



One of the things I find profoundly irritating about restaurants is the unfortunately common practice of Trying Too Hard. This entails dressing up what ought to be straight-ahead dishes with garnishes, decoration from squeeze bottles, fancy names or other affectations in an effort to both raise the price and make them appear trickier than they actually are. This can also include restaurants and kitchens trying too hard – attempting to turn out food which they, ultimately, are not qualified for.

This is why I love diners. The Santa Cruz Diner, like 10,000 other diners across the US, prepares simple, decent food at reasonable prices. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s good, and it’s fast, and it’s cheap and … well, you get the idea. When you’re driving into town and you’re hungry, you know that you can get fed quickly and pleasantly, as long as you’re not looking for a menu with a lot of French terms and complicated explanations.
The Center Street Grill operates in this same spirit. It’s a place that prepares food that’s about as straight-ahead as you can get. It’s really good, and it’s refreshingly straightforward. And those are both major blessings in my book, and I hope, in yours.
This is basically all-American food – classic American dishes prepared in the three-plop school – you got your meat, you got your vegetable, you got your starch, done. It’s well done, however, and that makes all the difference



The Location
The Center Street Grill is on, as its name implies, Center Street, just off of Pacific. This is a little pie-shaped neighborhood tucked under Mission Hill, where Route 1 and Water Street come together. There is not a lot of parking here, so either park in a lot near Pacific and walk over, or bring quarters and be prepared to do a little hunting for parking. That being said, this isn’t a particularly busy neighborhood at night, so it’s not a big deal.
Address: 1001 Mission Street, Santa Cruz, CA
Phone: (831) 423-4745

The Hours

Tuesday – Saturday, 5:30 until close. Lunch Monday – Saturday 11:30 – 2:00

The Ambiance

Airy, sunny and relatively quiet. There’s a big indoor seating area, and a smaller outside porch. The place has white paper on the tables, plants, modern California art on the walls.

The Service

Good. We were taken care of by one server for the entire meal, who was absurdly friendly, charming and fast.

The Price

Medium. $85 for two, including drinks and dessert. The portions are healthy – not gargantuan, but not too small.

The Food

Good, straight-ahead American food.
We started with two recommended appetizers. The first was a simple wedge salad. I love these, both for sentimental reasons and because they’re basically calorie bombs dressed up as a salad. A big wedge of iceberg lettuce (read: no nutritional value whatsoever) with a bunch of ranch dressing on it, and a lot of bacon. Served with a steak knife, to saw through the lettuce. Good, and about as all-American a salad as you can get.
The other appetizer was kind of fun. It was tempura-style green beans. Beans are dipped in some kind of batter, stir-fried, and then served with a hot sauce. This was interesting, and fortunately, not the kind of tempura where the vegetables have been completely covered in breading and then deep-fried. These were spicy, easily eaten (although dressed with ranch dressing) and very good. Perfect for sharing.
The entrees were equally straight-ahead and all-American. Beth had chicken Piccata, which is a simple dish of pan-fried chicken cutlets with a chicken-based sauce. Although this is basically Italian, American cooks adopted it decades ago, and it’s served in every home, diner and school in the country. It’s nicely-done here, delivered with mushrooms, asparagus and mashed potatoes. This is exactly what your mother would make if she was a really, really good cook. Excellent.
My entrée was along the same lines. I had a skirt steak, which is basically a flank steak that’s been marinated, ideally for a long, long time. For whatever reason, this cut of beef absorbs marinade like nobody’s business, and ends up with a really nice, rich flavor, that grills very fast, and stands up very well to the heat of an open flame. This was flawlessly done, and delivered, again, with mashed potatoes and asparagus. The asparagus was simply done – steamed, lightly dressed, and bam, on the plate. Good work.
Dessert was a final all-American favorite, bread pudding. This is bread that’s been soaked in things like butter, milk, eggs and spices, and then baked. Sometimes, as here, you can add bananas, and a sweet sauce. Almost every culture and cuisine has some version of this dish, and here it was, again, just like Mom would have made if Mom could cook like crazy. Really good, simple, straightforward, and a perfect complement to a final cup of coffee.
I really liked the Center Street Grill. I’m not crying any crocodile tears here, but writing a lot of restaurant reviews sometimes means figuring a lot of stuff out. I mean, Mongolian cuisine? What do you write about that? No problem with that here. This is food that I’ve been familiar with, and loved, for a long, long time, done really well, and at reasonable prices. Good place.

 See Mor Here: Source

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