To begin with, let’s make something clear. The restaurant at the recently opened Inn at Middletown on Main Street is not going to be one of your regular haunts when you get the urge to eat off campus. And it should not be. It is, after all, a hotel restaurant, and chances are you will never feel the need to go there if the parents are not in town.
The restaurant at the hotel, which opened next door to Pelton’s in the old Armory building on Main Street in October, is split into two sections. The first, the main dining room, was virtually empty on the day four of us went with one of our housemate’s parents who were in town for the night. Hopefully this was due to the fact that we arrived after the dinner rush and also during the major snow and ice storm that had just descended. The other half of the restaurant, where we sat, is the more casual Tavern at the Armory, with wood-paneled walls, a fireplace, framed prints, bookshelves, and a more club-like feel. The menu in both halves of the restaurant is identical.
As for the menu, it is a little pricey not only for Middletown, but also for what you get. The food, in keeping with the New England spirit of the hotel itself, is decidedly Continental. There ain’t no pad thai or organic soy here, kids. The food is hearty – and was perfect for the wintry day we were there. But vegetarians and vegans better B.Y.O Tofu, because every dinner entrée was made with something that once had a heartbeat.
The M.O. of the restaurant seems to be to take classic dishes and swap out a major ingredient to create a similar dish that gives you a vague idea of what you’ve ordered, but that you have never experienced before. Our favorite from this category of nouveaux-chic dishes was Lobster Shepherd’s Pie ($22.50). The first issue I took with this dish was that “shepherd” was spelled incorrectly on the menu. The second issue we discussed at length over our first bottle of wine was the fact that it’s called Shepherd’s Pie because shepherds tend sheep, and it’s traditionally made with lamb. A long discussion ensued over whether or not there were in fact such things as lobster shepherds and if so, where in Maine we could find them.
I was not prepared to go out to dinner and was not that hungry so I had two appetizers instead of an entrée. After ordering the Five Onion Soup ($4.95), we decided it likely contained five different kinds of onions, rather than five onions per bowl. It was excellent – full of sweet and tender onions, the broth was rich and flavorful, and there was enough cheese melted on top without the soup being covered in cheese. The Crab Cakes ($9.50) were also very good – made with plenty of crabmeat and not a lot of breadcrumbs as filler so they could skimp on the crab. However, the two cakes were a little small given what I was expecting.
Two of my housemates split the Queen Cut portion of the Prime Rib with Yorkshire Pudding ($17.50), which was cooked medium rare and was more than enough for the two of them. A few potatoes, vegetables and a Yorkshire pudding that got strong reviews from the two of them made this entrée one of the highlights of the evening.
The Chicken Pot Pie ($15.50) was a very generous portion served in an oval baking dish with plenty of large pieces of tender white chicken meat and vegetables in gravy baked underneath puff pastry.
After making it through our second bottle of wine, we were feeling pretty good, and were probably getting a little loud for the small dining room as we discussed such light topics as the economy, the evils of Bush, and how hot Liz’s mom thinks Spike is on “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”. Our waiter, who seemed a little overeager to please us given the lack of people in the dining room, talked us into ordering a few desserts to split between the six of us along with our coffee.
The highlight of our dessert experience was by far the Graham cracker coated deep fried strawberries. Have you ever eaten a deep fried strawberry? You Philistine, I bet you haven’t ever had Lobster Shepherd’s Pie either. Taken aback by this odd menu item, we asked our waiter who had thought up the deep-fried-Graham-cracker-strawberry combination. He replied that the chef put it on the menu because the Graham cracker was apparently invented in Middletown by a Wesleyan professor named, yes, Professor Graham. We raised a skeptical eyebrow at this, and while my internet research did show that Sylvester Graham did invent the Graham cracker and also promoted vegetarianism and founded the American Vegetarian Society in the mid-nineteenth century (how very Wesleyan of him), he promoted vegetarianism and shunned refined white flour because he thought it staved off the evils caused by sexual desire and masturbation (not very Wesleyan after all). And though he lived during the early days of this hallowed university, the jury is still out on whether he actually spent any time here spreading his anti-flour, anti-sex dogma.
By the time dinner was over, we had managed to be the last party in the small dining room, and we sat in front of a real fireplace flanked by not-so-real wall sconces bearing faux flames. The food at the Inn at Middletown was actually quite good, given that it is at its core a hotel restaurant. After some good food, good wine, and witty conversation, we drove very slowly home on the icy roads after our hearty but pricey winter meal, glad that Liz’s parents picked up the tab.
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