Baltimore Restaurant Week

For Restaurant Week in Baltimore, I went to one of my friends favorite places, Restaurant Tio Pepe, 10 E. Franklin St. Baltimore, MD 21202 . The Spanish cuisine restaurant is located in the basement of a building. You walk down the stairs and the ceiling is low, but there are nice brick arches in the structure that make you actually feel like you may be in Europe. The tables are tight together and lots of waiters are walking around in the narrow aisles of the decompartmented layout. I liked the place, it had ambiance and all the food on the tables looked good, and best yet, I spotted large handmade and painted pitchers of Sangria. Overall, I did like the restaurant, and would definately go again. My food was good, the sangria hit the spot and the setting was one of a kind. Over all, Tio Pepe gets 4 Yums. Forgive my pictures....I got carried away and wanted to taste the food so quickly that for both the appetizer and dessert, I dug in before taking a snapshot.

For my first course, I had the Seafood Bisque, which looked to be the most popular appetizer choice. Other members of the table chose the Salad and the Mushrooms on Toast, which was the size of a meal itslef. The soup was very good, but I was unhappy to find out that I had no actual chunks of seafood, where as another eater had quite a few pieces. I guess I got the wrong ladled bowl. It was thick, but not too filling.

For my main entree, I chose Paella a la Valenciana, which was saffron rice with a combination of mussles, veal, chorizo, chicken and shrimp. It was pretty good, and I can could only finish half of it, since I needed to leave room for dessert. When choosing, I was between this meal and the Beef in a Red Wine Sauce, but chose the Paella because the chorizo sounded great at the moment and I hadn't had veal in a really long time. But after tasting some of my friends Beef dish, I definately should have gone with the Beef. The flavor of the sauce was so intense and good and the beef was cooked well.

For dessert, I picked the Walnut Roll, which is supposed to be Tio Pepe's specialty dessert. The camera added a bit more brightness, but the dessert was actually pretty orangy/yellow. And it was delicious. I was skeptical at first, but I was so full and kept taking one more bite. The best part of teh dessert was the walnuts. The chef must have put them in a brown sugar bath or something when toasting them. I managed to eat all of the walnuts! I also had a bite of the chocolate roll, also seen in the picture. I almost got that because I was craving chocolate, but I am glad I didn't. It wasn't bad, but it was just ordinary, nothing like the Walnut Roll.