Andrea and I were feeling lazy for dinner today, so we decided to eat out in our neighborhood. There are 3 new restaurants that we still haven’t tried, but we decided to go to one of our tried and true restaurants, Birch & Rye, a restaurant with elevated Georgian/Russian cuisine.

We started with a couple cocktails made with their infused vodkas – Andrea had the black currant martini and I had the dirty horseradish cocktail (basically a dirty martini made with horseradish infused vodka and pickle juice). Delicious and strong and all I needed to drink for the entire meal.

We ordered 3 starters – the Pickled Board, the Faberge Egg, and the Einkorn Rasstegai (essentially their mini khachapuri which they used to serve as a much larger version). The various pickled items were great (esp. the beet and the squash and the kholrabi had a bit of spicy edge to it). The faberge egg was good (can’t complain about the osetra caviar and egg), but not spectacular. The khachapuri is a classic offering (we’ve ordered it everytime we’ve eaten here) was fantastic as always a must have.

For entrees, Andrea ordered the stroganoff, essentially a mushroom stroganoff made with einkorn grain noodles which had a fantastic rich mushroom flavor, but could have used just a touch more salt. I had the golubka which was a cabbage wrapped wagyu beef cheek with a demi-glace. The beef was fall-apart tender and the beef and demi-glace were very flavorful with some great spices/seasoning.

For dessert, we went with the donuts and caramel sauce and added the 5g of siberian sturgeon caviar. The donuts weren’t anything special themselves, but the sweet and savory combo of the caramel and the caviar was enjoyable.

All in all, it was definitely one of the best Wednesday evening dinners we’ve had (granted we don’t eat out on Wednesdays much) and we very much enjoyed just having very different cuisine, well executed, and close to home!