Domaine

Wilmington is hosting their annual City Restaurant Week from Monday, April 28th - Saturday, May 3rd. Lunch is 2 courses for $15 and dinner is 3 courses for $35. http://www.cityrestaurantweek.com/

Gamay is a red grape

Todd, Meg and I, along with our staff, thoroughly enjoyed all the meals we have had at Mandoline. You truly created a wonderful place with unique, creative food, all in a casual, non pretentious atmosphere. We wish you all the best at your next endeavour. Cheers, Tom Hudson Owner Domaine Hudson wine bar & eatery Wilmington, DE

Katie, Congrats on your new position! Great to hear you are working on Sunday...Tom and I are going to try to stop by tomorrow since that's our new date night! Meg

I agree with Katie, and would like to add the following... we are a 75 seat restaurant/bar and we have 50 wines by the glass at our establishment split between whites, reds, sparkling and dessert wines/ports. With the increase in poplularity of wine in the US, it has become a much more important part of the dining experience. I would like to add that it also depends on what you want your focus to be. Granted, we are a wine focused restaurant, but as Katie says...a lot depends on your size and volume. We don't have a fancy cruvinet system, because quite frankly, when we did the math, it didn't make sense to invest that much money. We simply pump the bottles down each evening and only keep them for 48 hours. We might be able to keep some longer, but we adopted that as our standard.

Thanks, Katie. It was the first time I was in for dinner. I stopped by during restaurant week in Feb for a glass of wine. We had the red sangria, which was nice and refreshing! It's been quite an interesting nine months to say the least...a lot of hard work, yes, but I absolutely have no regrets! Looking forward to seeing you too!

Thanks! The award was really quite a pleasant suprise to us! I wish I could be more active, but with t-w-o full time jobs, I don't have much free time. For now, I will have to remain more of a luker....

Ok, I have been lurking around here a lot, but you can now offically initiate me into the Amada fan club! Being in the restaurant biz myself, the only night I have off is Monday and I am usually too tired to head up to Philly from Wilmington, DE. Since my husband was out of town, a friend and I made the trek up there. We loved every bit of it. In fact, after our meal was done, we were busy looking at what everyone else was being served to make note of what to order next time. We had some sort of salad with ham and figs, crab stuffed peppers, roasted vegetable with goat cheese on little toasts, braised short rib flat bread and manchego cheese with some lavendar honey. To drink we had a glass of Sangria and a really nice granacha. The only downside was that Katie wasn't there!

We had a great meal there during restaurant week. My husband and I went with another couple and sampled the entire menu!! I especially like the Mediterranean eggplant with mushrooms, onions, peppers and Israeli couscous, but it was all excellent. I also had the pleasure of meeting Chef Todd. Meg

Glad to see all the great comments! We just made reservations for Restaurant Week and we are really looking forward to it.

Of course, the seafood is what I think of when asked about local cuisine...I dream of my aunt's crab cakes and oyster fritters. Has anyone ever had a Smith Island Cake? I am originally from Salisbury, MD, but my father's family is from Deal Island and Smith Island. It's generally an 8 - 10 layer cake made from very thin layers with icing in between each layer. I have seen any number of different icings and toppings used. Here's a link to a recipe. http://www.smithisland.org/cakerecipe.html