Restaurant Redux, Part 1

I don't know about y'all, but our vacations are planned around food. Pretty much the first thing I do right after deciding where we're going is to decide where we'll eat once we get there! This trip to coastal North Carolina was no different. I thought I'd do a breakdown of a few of the places we ate: good, bad and indifferent.

Icehouse Waterfront Restaurant

This place is, as the name suggests, right on the waterfront. It has a great view, and an overall casual atmosphere. Wanting to branch out and try something new, Handsome ordered the lobster ravioli special. I ordered the Icehouse Grouper Royale - described as pan seared grouper in a bacon, potato & herb crust, topped with a chive Beurre Blanc, with mashed potato. While the potatoes were lumpy, lukewarm and generally uninspiring, the grouper was excellent. I highly recommend it! 

Handsome's ravioli looked, and tasted, disgusting. The ravioli themselves were drowned in a sludgy brown sauce and topped with flakes of fishy-smelling "crab meat". After asking the waitress to take away the barely-touched plate and ordering his usual fried shrimp instead, we began looking around at everyone else's plates. Fried shrimp. Fried fish. Fried chicken. French fries. You get the idea. We realized that though they might want people to think of them as upscale, Icehouse is essentially a deep-fried kind of place. And that's okay! Handsome's shrimp and fries were some of the best he said he's ever had. 

Yana's Ye Olde Drugstore Restaurant

This place is kitschy! The walls are covered in Elvis/Marilyn Monroe/1950's memorabilia. But Handsome and I braved it anyway. Lunch there was fabulous. No other word for it. Thick, juicy burgers cooked to order served with handfuls of fried Yukon Gold potatoes -- Don't miss it!