It's a Celebration B*^@! - Restaurant Week at Toulouse Petit Kitchen & Lounge

I recently accepted an offer for an amazing new job. Emi and I are both very excited about the new opportunity and can't wait to see what the future holds. To celebrate the big occasion and to thank our parents for their continued support we wanted to take them out to dinner for Restaurant Week.

We decided to try out Toulouse Petit Kitchen and Lounge at the base of Queen Anne, next to Peso's. We had never been to Toulouse before, but wanted to try something different. Toulouse is a French/Creole themed restaurant.

Most of our group started off with the Cauliflower soup with Dungeness crab. You could also smell and taste the added truffle oil. I wasn't able to try the soup because of the crab, but it smelled decadent.

I instead started with the True French Onion Soup Lyonnaise. It was a rich beef stock, gruyere, crouton, and onion confit.

For the main course, Emi went with the Oven Roasted Duck Confit over Brussel Sprouts and house made tasso. The duck was great and the toasted shallots really added to the dish. We both agreed that toasted shallots would be good with anything. Unfortunately the Brussel Sprouts were a little tough and sour. Being big fans of Brussel Sprouts we were sort of disappointed.

My main course was the Gulf Shrimp, Crawfish, and Housemade Andouille over Creamy Corn Grits. Amazing, hands down the best thing I ate that night. After visiting North Carolina this past Fall for a wedding, I have fallen in love with shrimp and grits. Amazing combination and again they did a great job with their spin on this dish. The shrimp and home made sausage were both very flavorful; spicy and smokey and great with the creamy grits. Also the crawfish was good too, like little nuggets of crustacean goodness. I wasn't sure at first what was the crawfish because they serve them peeled, but after finding the little guys, they were hard to miss with the great flavor.

My dad went with the yellow eye snapper in creole court bouillon with gulf shrimp, mussels, and manila clams. Sort of like a Creole cioppino.

For dessert I had the Granny Smith Apple Cobbler. Unfortunately for everyone else this is where the meal sort of went downhill. My cobbler was good, but the white chocolate bread pudding was sort of blah and my Dad mentioned really rummy.

Emi's side of the family went with the beignets. We were expecting fluffy, flaky, melt in your mouth beignets, but were disappointed with the burnt looking and doughy variety. Emi's mom even mentioned to the waitress that they may have been burnt. She assured us that they weren't, it's just that they don't change their oil that often so that's why they turn that color and they were meant to be dense.... OK thanks for the explanation, so in a round about way she just told us to never order these again.

Sort of a crappy way to end our meal and the waitress definitely didn't help make our experience more enjoyable, but all in all it was a cool new restaurant with some highlights to the meal. Just avoid dessert. Next time we have something to celebrate and I decided to drop that much on dinner, we'll probably go to a tried and true type of place. They did advertise throughout the restaurant and online that they have one of the best happy hours in the nation. I may have to go test out that claim sometime. So if anyone is ever down for HH at Toulouse let me know!

- Kyle