Harlow Grove is a great addition to the Winter Garden dining scene. It’s just a couple blocks south of Plant Street, where most of the other restaurants are, but it has a completely different vibe. The building is absolutely gorgeous. I felt like I was in a trendy new restaurant in Chicago. It’s visually stunning inside, and the acoustic design is pretty good. There’s a nice variety of seating from bar to table to booth. We loved our corner table in the nook.
The menu is really well thought out. It offers a nice variety of appetizers, salads, and main dishes along with some handhelds. Everything was very appealing, so it was difficult to decide where to start. We settled upon sharing a Caesar salad and the bread service. The Caesar was excellent. The crunch of toasted parmesan on the top was particularly appealing. The bread service was a pull-apart loaf served with two different butters. It was also very good. It might be the only thing on the menu that I thought was maybe overpriced for what it was, but everything else on the menu is extremely reasonably priced.
For our second course, we shared the bisque, a thick truffle-infused potage, and the shrimp cocktail: a conventional assortment of large fresh prawns served with cocktail sauce and horseradish. We enjoyed both of these.
For entrees, my wife had the PEI mussels and I had the filet mignon. She enjoyed her muscles, although they weren’t to my taste, but the filet mignon was wonderful. Perfectly seared and served with truffle mashed potatoes that were like the big brother of the bisque we had earlier.
Service provided by Renato was fabulous. He was not just a server but a delightful host whose recommendations were greatly appreciated.
This restaurant has a sizable cocktail list and a compact but extremely well-thought-out wine list. I can’t think of another wine list that has a higher hit ratio in terms of wines that I would personally choose to put on a wine list, and yet the overall wine pricing is extremely fair.
I also sampled two cocktails which were both standouts. The Fancy Martini is a spectacularly complex vodka-based martini with a terrific balance of pepper and saline flavors. And the caviar-stuffed olives that came with it were a nice bonus.
After dinner, I had the espresso martini, which is also very good and unusual in its incorporation of pistachio. Definitely worth trying.
We love this new addition to Winter Garden. It’s distinct from all the other restaurants in Winter Garden and has already obviously found a tremendous fan base because it was busy every moment that we were there on a Wednesday evening.
