Food Country Restaurant Reviews serving the Delaware Valley

This authentic French creperie is located just a block from the lively South Street shops and bars in Philadelphia , and offers both elegant indoor and outdoor dining. Beau Monde’s crepe menu is divided into two categories: savory and sweet. For either type, you can either order from a list of house recommendation crepes, or you can get creative and build your own crepe from a bevy of filling options. The savory crepes, which generally run for about $12-14, are served in a thin buckwheat pancake and can include fillings such as cheese or sauce and meats such as ham, chicken breast, andouille sausage, or fish, and vegetables such as tomatoes, mushrooms, or roasted leeks. The sweet crepes, usually from about $8-10, are made with wheat flour and also feature numerous options, such as flavored butter, chocolate, fresh fruit, ice cream, or custard. Jeff’s Take: For my savory crepe, I went with the coq au vin—a classic French dish that’s slow cooked with chicken, red wine, baby onions, mush...

Located in a small strip mall behind a gas station, Café Valentina isn’t easy to find. This small, somewhat cramped neighborhood Italian restaurant offers a casual atmosphere, with an intimate dining area in the front and a tiny bar in the back. The menu isn’t imaginative by any means, but features a nice selection of Italian standards, including pasta, pizza, veal, chicken, and seafood dishes. Jeff’s Take: Café Valentina is known for its delicious garlic bread, and deservedly so. Each table gets a serving of large, pillowy dinner rolls, drenched in extra virgin olive oil with fresh chopped garlic and a sprinkling of parsley. What makes it so good is that rather than serving the olive oil on the side, like most restaurants, the plated garlic bread at Café Valentina is already swimming in the olive oil and garlic, so the bread has gotten a chance to absorb the flavor. Despite the large size of the rolls, a second helping was necessary. For my entrée, I ordered the Veal Saltimbocca Roman...

Dome Restaurant and Bar, located in Hockessin , Delaware ’s Lantana Square , is the sister restaurant of Eclipse, located on Union Street in Wilmington . Both restaurants have a similar hip, modern feel, although Dome is much bigger than Eclipse, featuring a bigger bar area and outdoor dining, as well as another smaller room for private parties. Dome’s cuisine is d escribed as “urban American,” including steak, seafood, pizzas, salads, and sandwiches. Jeff’s Take: The appetizers we started off with—fried calamari, pork pot stickers, and the hummus plate—were for the most part good, but slightly flawed. The pork pot stickers featured traditional Asian-style fried pork dumplings in a sweet and sour ginger glaze. Dumplings are usually served with a saltier soy-vinegar sauce, but Dome went in the opposite direction with the sweet and sour. This mild sauce was tasty, but was overpowered by the stronger flavors of pork, scallions, and ginger in the dumplings. The fried calamari, which featu...

Jeff's Take: One of the great advantages of city living is the concept of the food cart. A good food cart can offer a quick, convenient, cheap, and delicious meal, and the best food carts can even be deserving of a special trip. In Philadelphia , the best place to go searching for good food cart cuisine is West Philly’s University City neighborhood. Dozens of food cart vendors congregate there every day, offering a variety of options to the thousands of students in the area. How successful are the University City food carts? Just look at Greek Lady , which started out as a cart and now has a permanent storefront nearby. Thanks to a recommendation from my brother Erick, who lives in the area, I recently discovered a cart that could end up being just as successful—Tacos Don Memo, located at 38 th and Sansom. A trip to any food cart carries with it a range of possibilities in terms of quality. Some carts clearly haven’t been visited by the health inspector in quite awhile (if ev...

Washington Street Ale House is located in downtown Wilmington on (surprise!) Washington Street and has been around since 1996. The restaurant served upscale pub and tavern food alongside handcrafted beer and microbrews in a restored downtown building. The exposed brick walls, 19th century photographs, oak floors, fireplace, and open porch give the ale house a great warm ambiance. While Washington Street does not brew any of their own beers, they do have 20 beers on-tap many of which come from local breweries. Mike’s Take: It’s hard not to draw comparisons to Iron Hill Brewery when you visit Washington Street. The menu and décor are very similar. In fact, I ordered the same cheese steak eggroll appetizer that I had at Iron Hill. Here is where the restaurants start to differ. Washington Street Ale House’s food is definitely a little more upscale than Iron Hill’s both in presentation and price. The cheese steak eggrolls were very good, but could have been cheesier and a slightly bigger po...

Buckley’s Tavern, a bar and restaurant located in a historic former house on Kennett Pike in Centreville, Delaware, offers nice atmosphere for a variety of purposes. The dark, cozy bar is a great place to get some drinks, the downstairs dining room (with fireplace) offers a charming ambiance for lunch or dinner, and the rooftop deck is great when the weather gets nice. Buckley’s also has an interesting brunch policy—dine in your pajamas, and you get ½ off the bill. Enticing, but neither of us did it. Jeff’s Take: I started off with a bowl of mushroom soup—a generous portion of mushrooms with leeks and tomatoes in broth. I’m a big mushroom fan, but I found this soup to be pretty boring. The broth was salty and unimpressive, and after I finished scooping out the mushrooms it wasn’t worth bothering with. The Steak & Egg Grinder (right) was also a disappointing experience. “Tenderloin with sautéed onions, garlic & scrambled eggs topped with provolone on a crusty roll” sounded prett...