rightupmyalley.

Admittedly, I’m a little late wrapping up my restaurant week adventures, but I was disappointed in my last stop at Perilla, and I didn’t want to be. 

Perilla is Harold Dieterle’s first restaurant in the west village. As a long time Top Chef fan, I’ve been wanting to go to Perilla since Harold opened it up in 2007…even though I’ve heard better things about his second restaurant, Kin Shop.

Anyways, the place is cute - romantic, with intimate lighting and a warm feel. RP and I were starving while waiting for SA, so we ordered a small plate off the regular menu to start - the beer-battered pickles with lemon aioli. The pickles were lightly fried, but still moist when broken open, and the sweet-ish aioli balanced the saltiness of the dish perfectly. Off of this plate, RP and I were convinced we were about to have an epic meal.

Unfortunately, little did we know we were about to have a very typical restaurant week dinner. You know the ones I’m talking about, where you can tell the regular menu food is good, but the RW food is dumbed down, or cheaper, or completely unbalanced.

Once SA arrived, and we ordered, I started out with the mussels in a cream sauce with ham. It was perfectly fine, but nothing too memorable. I followed with homemade tagliatelle with tofu and vegetables in a butter-based sauce. The pasta was beautiful, but the dish overall felt heavy and one-note. Not a winner in the slightest.

For the dessert we all got the house sorbet tasting  (boring, I know). But there was this apple cinnamon one that actually tasted like cake. It was pretty amazing. Out of the other two sorbets, one was forgettable, and the other was terrible. So terrible we all made faces when tasting it.

Conclusion: I’d go back to Perilla for drinks and small plates (after all, I HAVE to have those pickles again), but not for dinner.