Good Menus and Café Zenon

I love food and I love to read menu’s and imagine how the dishes on it will taste. My all-time favorite restaurant for the last 30 years closed its doors forever this spring. Something about how the owners wanted to retire and have a life after food, or something like that which I guess after 30 years of working 6 days a week with very little vacations might sound pretty good to me also if I were in their place. This restaurant represented the ultimate place in terms of reading their menu because they printed it new every day and you never knew what dishes they had served over the years would be on it that day or what new dishes would be served. The menu read like an ingredient list in a cookbook. In example this would be how the appetizer would be listed: Lemon Garlic Shrimp – Shrimp, olive oil, garlic, oregano and lemon juice with toasted bread.

If you didn’t like any of the ingredients then you wouldn’t order the dish because it would be exactly what was listed (except for things like salt and pepper). Every day they would have dishes I had before, but you never knew which ones would reoccur, and every day there would be new dishes based on the fresh ingredients of the day. I liked their inventive menu and their imaginative use of ingredients and I never failed to find something on the menu I wanted to eat. I am sad to see them go but I understand why after 30 years of running a restaurant that they wanted to do something else. Farewell Zenon Café!