Shoreline Grill

I had recently been bemoaning the lack of vegan-friendly upscale restaurants.  While looking for a place to take my grandmother for Mother's Day, my wonderful mother found the Shoreline Grill - a very nice restaurant with a vegetarian menu, that actually includes several options marked as vegan.

I started with a local microgreens salad with dried tart cherries, toasted hazelnuts, and a roasted poblano vinaigrette.  The flavors worked very well together, and I'd definitely order it again.  We decided to try both of the vegan small plates.  The first was a tofu tartare, with a "creamy" wasabi sauce, avocado, and house made taro chips.  The tofu was lightly marinated with just enough sesame oil to give it a hint of smokiness, without overpowering the other flavors.  The other small plate was a "vegetable twister" - basically a sushi roll with avocado, cucumber, asparagus, and sweet soy sauce - all wrapped in potato strings and then deep fried until the potato is browned and crispy.  The penne pasta entree was lovely, with a very light sauce enhancing the flavors of the vegetables, rather than it being the primary flavor.  For dessert the kitchen put together a dish for us that included a strawberry sorbet surrounded by a flash-frozen berry mix. 

Overall, the experience was quite good, and we had a lovely evening.  However, as I began writing this post, I realized that instead of the vegan pan roasted tofu that we thought we had ordered for our second entree, we were served the dish directly below it on the menu which included a ginger cream sauce.  I'm pretty upset about it, but I can't remember if I specifically said vegan when ordering the tofu.  It's such a habit for me that I think I did, but I'm not entirely sure.  Where the creamy sauce would normally have been a clue for me, the sauce with the tofu tartare was also quite creamy, and was vegan, so I didn't suspect.  I saw a tofu dish marked vegan and ordered it, without really looking closely at the rest of the description.  I didn't even look at any of the menu items not marked vegan, or I probably would have realized they'd served us something else entirely.  I'm pretty much kicking myself, and feeling a bit ill now at the thought of eating cow excretions.  Now I'm just hoping that the dairy doesn't trigger a migraine for me.