Some good frou-frou.

Late last year, a new French Cuisine restaurant opened in Richland.  As much as I like eating tasty things, I don't really consider myself to be a 'foodie', and I'm one of those folks who consider French cooking to be very foo-fooey. Still, the new restaurant, Lepice Spice Kitchen, has gotten really good reviews, and so, I decided to take my wife there for a 'brunch date' this morning.

What a smart choice on my part.  Brunch was FANTASTIC.

My wife and I started with a shared appetizer...quinoa cakes, which were served with a citrus butter glaze.  I've never had quinoa cakes.  As near as I could tell, it was quinoa, ground up and almost baked to a corn bread consistency, then pan seared to give it some crust before plating.  It's not the kind of thing I thought I would like...but I did.

For our entrees, my wife had the Cod Benedict. 

I ordered the croquet-madame(which I didn't realize was essentially a grilled cheese sandwich with a fried egg on top).  If I had known that, I am not sure I would have ordered it, just because there were other tasty sounding things on the menu.  I'm glad I didn't know.

At  home, if I do fried eggs, I usually break the yolk and cook it through(to go on a breakfast sandwich), so I was a bit daunted by this sunny-side up egg staring at me...but it was AMAZING...like butta'.  That egg didn't come from any store...it came from chickens WAY more spoiled than mine are.  I was also blown away by the size of my sandwich...I'm not going to say I left there filling stuffed...but I did not leave hungry either. Much larger serving than I had allowed myself to think we were going to get at a fancy French place.

As good as my wife's Egg's Benedict was, and my grilled ham/cheese with fried egg was, my wife and I both agreed that the best thing we ate there were the hash browns that came with our brunch...Truffle-Parmesan Hash Browns.  I CAN NOT remember ever eating better hash browns in my life...they won in both the taste and texture categories. 

My wife has already asked that we come back to try their dinner for our anniversary.  They do an 8-course dinner special for a reasonable sounding price...if you account for the fact that it's 8-courses and comes with wine.  The only thing people have warned me about the dinner is time.  I have been told not to go if I can't afford to sit at the table for three hours enjoy a break in between each course.