Many Notes Lead to Sweet, Symphonic Ending

A trip to Café Cullen* will bring your palette many delights. The one-day-only restaurant is a buffet style service, and it features many different kinds of food. This small, but homey restaurant offers a wide variety of appetizers, main courses, sides, and desserts.
The highlight of the appetizer menu is by far the sambusa. This pastry, generally found in East Asia, was perfectly made at Café Cullen. The outer pastry was fried to a crisp, and each one was shaped in a two-bite triangle. The inside was filled with spicy shredded beef and seasonings that complemented one another well. While the pastry was well made, it left something to be desired as far as a dipping sauce or chutney. The dish would have been complete with more acidity.
The cranberry orzo pasta salad was the star of the entire meal. Orzo is, in my opinion, pasta that is not used hardly enough in cooking. You will find this rice-shaped pasta to be cooked at an al-dente that any Italian grandmother would praise. The dish hit every part of the palette. A bite consisted of an explosion of flavors—mint, almonds, dried cranberries, and a light drizzle of olive oil.

A close second to the orzo was the potato salad. This was not a simple potato salad one would happen upon at a family picnic, but a well-composed dish. One can clearly taste the thought put into its making. The hearty sized potatoes were complimented by occasional bites of crunchy asparagus, green pepper, and red onion. The flavors were married together with the acidity of red wine vinegar.
A four bean salad, more cleverly composed than its name were next on the menu. While this dish left many raving of the flavors, I found its seasonings to be slightly overbearing. The oregano left an aftertaste that let me reaching for my glass of lemonade. Overall, the ingredients were well cooked, but the execution and flavor pairing needs more thought.

Desserts made up nearly half of the menu at Café Cullen. There were a variety; lemon cake, almond cupcakes, brownies, cake pops, hot milk cake, and many more. The lemon cake was perfect. It had a moist cake and a tart and creamy lemon icing. Lemon zest was added to both the cake and icing, not leaving anything to be desired flavor-wise. The almond cupcakes with a simple vanilla buttercream were delicious. The almond flavor was, again, reminiscent of Italy. The cake in this dessert was also fluffy.

The brownies were some of the most delectable I have ever tasted at a restaurant. They were chewy, but not too. They were fudgy; sweet, but rich in chocolate. A rival to any homemade version, though they would have been better with walnuts.

The cake pops—not usually something that would appear on a restaurant menu so much as Starbucks—brought the restaurant from three stars to two. Cake pops as a culinary invention are despicable. Their gooey insides make you believe you are consuming raw batter, though it is really cake smashed together with any old icing. The mashed up mess was, at Café Cullen, coated in a far too thick shell of milk chocolate. These are meant to be a sort of desert amuse-bouche, yet a one-bit consumption would leave one in a desperate search of something to wash it down.

The hot milk cake was the dessert menu’s savior. What other deserts lacked in presentation, texture, and taste were forgotten in this piece of cake. The sponge cake was made with milk, flour, hints of vanilla, and love. A light dusting of powdered sugar was all it needed to be exceptional.

Overall, my trip to Café Cullen was successful, and it took me around to world and back to my own kitchen. The menu is vast, and the flavors leave nothing to be desired at the end of a meal; unless you order the cake pops.

*Cafe Cullen is the name of my Journalism teacher's fictional restaurant for our introduction to restaurant reviews.