Bleu Restaurant and Bar
I celebrated a birthday recently with a dinner gathering at Bleu Restaurant and Bar on Frontis Street, behind the Village Tavern off of Hanes Mall Boulevard. I like this restaurant a lot, although I’ve been there only a handful of times. It offers a nice selection of dishes, from reasonably priced sandwiches to pricey entrees, has an appealing atmosphere, features lovely presentation on dishes—and serves tofu! Sadly, there aren’t a lot of restaurants in town who do, so I get really excited when I find ones that do.
As another plus, they seem to be quite attuned to the needs of vegetarians—our server knew exactly which dishes were vegetarian and how others could be altered to make them vegetarian. The kitchen is very willing to make changes to accomodate special diets. If none of the vegetarian dishes on the menu strike your fancy—such as the tofu appetizer with vegetable sushi rolls (big enough for an entree in my opinion), the cheese ravioli or the brie, tomato and arugula sandwich—you can get a vegetable plate; the chef will sear you some tofu or make a vegetarian risotto to go along with it.
However, in yet another instance illustrating how vegetarians need to ask about dishes no matter what, take this dish on the menu: Fresh Egg Noodle with Sauteed Asian Vegetables, Seared Tofu, & Kaffir Lime Scallion Broth. Sounds perfectly vegetarian, right? Unfortunately, it wasn’t—our server told us that there’s beef stock in the broth. (I really don’t understand why they’d put beef stock in something that sounds so vegetarian, or that contains tofu—far more vegetarians than carnivores would order that!) You could get it with a different sauce, though, which is what I did. My white-wine sauce was yummy and came in a small teapot for me to pour over the noodles. It was an unexpected and fun presentation. Although I really wanted a vegetarian version of the Kaffir Lime Scallion Broth.
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