Lots of pictures and reviews below.

Here in Madison there is a biannual event they call Restaurant Week. The basic setup is that a few dozen restaurants agree to produce a variety of 3 course dinners for 25 dollars a head (some places do lunches as well for 15).

In essence it’s advertising for the city’s nice, often ethnic, dining spaces; they provide a lower cost sample of their cuisine and get a lot of free promotion online, as well as a chance to bring in new customers with a special event.

It certainly worked for us. This year we went to 3 restaurants, two of which we hadn’t been to before. First, we dined at the always-wonderful Samba, a Brazillian/South American grill restaurant located off State Street downtown.

Samba’s thing is that they provide a nice little salad bar (it has the same selection each time as far as I can tell) and skewers of fresh meat, sliced right at your table. It’s sort of a buffet combined with a bit of dinner theatre, and very nice. Samba doesn’t do anything different for Restaurant Week, they just lower the cost to the 25 dollar per person level. It’s apparently a big draw for them; last winter we couldn’t get reservations as I waited too long.

This time it was crowded but not overly so. As usual there was a 3 piece band doing live music; the salad bar, as I said previously, was precisely the same as the last time, with a variety of cold salads, vegetables, and some truly excellent mashed potatoes and black beans in chafing dishes.

The meat selection was mostly the same this time as the first time we went as well, though they didn’t have duck, which they did back in January or February when we first went. They had 7 or 8 kinds of meat as I recall, along with (and I’ve never heard of this before) grilled pineapple. The pineapple is great and makes a nice hot fruit dessert.

Let’s see if I can recall the meats: they had some South American sausages, flank steak (fantastic), top sirloin, barbecue chicken, jerk pork… hmm. I forget the rest. At any rate, there’s plenty of variety.

On Wednesday we went to our first new place, Liliana’s. Liliana’s is a Cajun-Creole place that’s actually about a block from our house, so in terms of convenience it’s hard to beat.

(Note the fake balcony with Mardi-Gras beads indoors.)

You can see our menu choices here. I got the ‘Bayou’ option whereas my esteemed roommate got the ‘French Quarter’.

Here you can see the Barbecue Prawns I got for my appetizer. These were very messy but also quite tasty, if a bit disturbing, since you have to rip off the head, legs, eyes, etc, from a creature with a face to eat it.

(For her appetizer the roommate got a tasty salad that was loaded down with very salty blue cheese)

Our entrees were interesting, though the roomie wasn’t a huge fan of the scallop mousse, and I thought my chicken with alligator piquant was a bit bland.

(Alligator Piquant with Chickory Roast Chicken)

The cynic in me notes how the restaurant features the Alligator in the title, while the actual dish is overwhelmingly chicken-based.

(Scallop Two Ways)

The chicken was well done, but the sauce, alligator aside (yes, it does have a small amount of alligator in it) is a fairly unremarkable tomato concoction. Alligator seems to taste mostly like drier, slightly gritty beef, if you’re curious.

Overall, Liliana’s was our least favorite of the three restaurants. The food just doesn’t jump out at you, and it doesn’t have half the atmosphere of Samba. There was live music the night we went, but the way the restaurant is set up, most of the seating area can’t see the performers or hear them directly (as opposed to Samba, where the restaurant floor is laid out in what looks to be a converted performing area, with a small stage in front)

For our third Restaurant Week meal, we went to Inka Heritage. Don’t let the world’s worst flash website fool you, it’s a pretty good restaurant.

You can see our menu options here.

First though, for beverages, we both got something that the menu described as a ‘purple corn drink’, I forget the name. It’s delicious, and as you can see, very purple.

For appetizers, I got the Causa Marinera, and the roommie got the Inka Salad. The salad wasn’t anything hugely special, though the Peruvian corn (choclo) has a very interesting texture; whereas I quite liked the Causa Marinera, which is a slightly spicy potato salad sort of deal.

For the entrees, I got the Lomo Saltado and the roomie got the Aji de Pollo. We both liked these quite a bit; the Lomo Saltado doesn’t have too much cilantro (a fear of the roomie whenever she sees it in an ingredient list) and the beef was excellent; the Aji de Pollo had a nice, simple rich sauce. Quite tasty.

Finally, for dessert, I got the Suspiro a la Limena, and the roommate got the Mousse de Lucuma. Overall I think we both agree that I got the better deal here. The Suspiro is a tasty custardy sort of dessert, or something like a sugar-cream pie. The Mousse is just sort of mousse-y, neither bad nor particularly good.

(The Suspiro is on the left)

Overall Inka Heritage is a nice ethnic place that reminds me a bit of the restaurants-in-houses Bloomington. The restaurant itself is small, and there’s no real atmosphere to speak of; it faces the street on all sides and the windows are a bit spider infested, quite frankly, which I found entertaining but arachnophobes out there might not appreciate.

One thing I do have to note: our experience there was somewhat impacted by being stuck in the restaurant at the same time as a family that brought, to a nice restaurant, during a special event, a very, very loud, screaming child.

These jerks.

What possesses people to haul their infants out to ruin the times of other people? It’s completely beyond me. Just… completely. The baby doesn’t get anything out of it, and everyone else is made miserable. Young parents have such a profound sense of entitlement in our society, they just assume we should all arrange our lives around their decision to breed. It’s repulsive selfishness.

Like I said, jerks.