Dining at Towne

Sometimes a memorable dinner is more about the company than the food. When you are dining with the owners of the area’s hottest new wine store, a teacher from Le Cordon Bleu, a Certified Specialist in Wine (and candidate for Master of Wine AND wine instructor), a Starbucks coffee expert with an arsenal of great stories, a fabulously fun and stylin’ stylist, and the larger-than-life Chef Robin White, the food just somehow fades into the background.

Thanks to the magic of Twitter, I somehow found myself meeting this group at Towne Stove & Spirits last night. We convened at the bar, some of us meeting for the first time (past visits with Chef Robin White are posted here and here), and then traveled across the restaurant and up the stairs to a big table, separated from the larger dining room with a folding screen. I think, at first, we thought they expected us to be loud , but it turns out they had a much larger corporate group on the other side.

I have to admit, I was talking and listening too much to pay attention to many details of the meal, and the lighting wasn’t great for photos. But there was wine, and it was good.

I did find the lobster chowder to be quite delicious with lots of tender lobster and a big, buttery biscuit that just soaked up the soup and melted into it.

For my main course, I had the burratta and arugula salad which was just okay. The burratta was missing that gooey center and was a little more like regular store-bought mozzarella.

The husband and I shared dessert, cake with caramel ice cream, topped with maple cotton candy, which was definitely my favorite part. I haven’t had cotton candy in ages, and this was a fun way to combine the childhood treat with a classic New England ingredient.

Overall, I found Towne to be a little peculiar. It is a huge restaurant with a lot going on everywhere, from the décor to the noise level to the overwhelming menu, which is intended to reflect cuisines from all over the world, but kind of just feels all over the place. They could probably cut the menu in half and still have a huge selection of items but a little bit more focus.

Luckily, the stories and laughs our table more than made up for any of this. Who would have thought 140 characters could lead to evenings that could last well into the night?

If you are a blogger or on Twitter, have you met any of your contacts in real life or attended any events? Or if you are a blog reader, have you attended any events to meet bloggers?