Wild Orchid Cafe

My Mom wanted to go to the Wild Orchid Cafe in Eastport on Mother's Day, but none of us--her children--had the foresight to make reservations in time, so we got Giolitti takeout instead (link was down when I posted, but that's their website).

Anyhow, we took a rain check on Wild Orchid and went today for lunch. The menu is small, and just about everything has either crab or some derivation of pork/ham, which made it tough for a Kosher-keeping mother to find something to eat. We each got the butternut squash soup, mine with crab meat, Mom's without. It was decent. The lump crab meat was tasty. There was nothing else in the soup, though.

For lunch, Mom got the chicken salad sandwich, which I didn't taste, but it looked good and she finished it (minus the kaiser roll). I ordered a bison burger with smoked Gouda and hickory smoked bacon, cooked medium. Mid-rare might have been a better option. Strangely, they didn't offer any kind of sauce like ketchup with the burger. In fact, there is no ketchup in house. So I ate the burger sans sauce. Both dishes came with a salad with mixed greens, strawberries, blue cheese, and a sweet vinaigrette dressing. They also came with a chopped fruit salad that had apple, pineapple, grapes, and a number of other ambiguous fruits that I could have identified had I not horsed them all down. Side salads were very good. The burger was good, too, but a little overcooked for my liking. Note to others wishing to try bison, it is very lean, high in protein, and gets a little tough when it is overcooked, but has more flavor than beef. Recommendation: try it medium-rare.

The iced tea was unique, in that it might have had a little too much lemon, not enough tea. It was refreshing, though, if you like lemon.

Dessert, while limited in options, was delicious. I tried the vanilla creme brulee. Mom had the mocha creme brulee. The mocha was definitely the way to go. I have been making creme brulee for my loyal faithfuls at Carpaccio every night for the past two weeks, and haven't gotten to taste it, so I thought I should take advantage. Worth the price, whatever it was. The mocha came out heated. The texture was a little runnier than it should be, and the sugar on top was a little over-bruleed (flambeed). But the taste was fantastic. The vanilla was very good, exactly what I would expect from a creme brulee. If anything, my sugar may have been under-bruleed.

Food rating: B-.
Experience: A-, thanks to good company and a relatively friendly server.