Carriage House Cafe

(No Pictures...but a milestone!)

Brunch: my least favourite meal of the day because it means that I didn't wake up early enough for both breakfast, second breakfast, AND lunch. However, brunch at the Carriage House Cafe this afternoon was quite a relaxing and novel experience.

Carriage House Cafe is a restaurant that offers local food. It is blatantly obvious when pointed out, on Stewart Ave, but is otherwise camoflauged because it has no blatant neon sign and it is painted an olive green that matches the nearby trees. It kind of looks like a barn, and the front door is difficult to open. The interior is both bubolic (with stone brick walls, lazy fans, and a winter scene painted on a giant saw) and old-school modern (with typewriters, a turtle lamp, old-style radio, and glass tables), if that's even a style.

It was really busy when we arrived at noon, so we either had to wait upstairs (really pretty, natural lighting, clean, quaint), or sit at the couch. We decided that we might as well eat at the wooden coffee table with the velvet, paisley-seated couch with plump beige cushions in which you could lose yourself (or your wallet, haha). It felt a little uncanny to be about 50 cm lower than everyone else seated at tables. Maybe it just seemed too casual. If the entire restaurant were couches and beanbags... well, then, that's a business plan.

The locally-killed animals included salmon, cow, pig, and rabbit (there may have been others but I don't recall...). As I have never been offered the opportunity to try rabbit, I was in quite a quandary. I like rabbits. They're cute. I frequently consider getting a pet rabbit after I graduate. Heck, a rabbit face is on my login screen! So...no rabbit, rabbit pate, or rabbit sausage? What a eerie feeling, which was soon overwhelmed by my animalistic desires to try new animals and not be a hypocrite (because I eat cows. Why not rabbits?).

I ordered the breakfast sandwich, which was an apple and rabbit sausage, egg (I asked for poached), and salad lettuce, served in house-made ciabatta (one side coated in butter, the other side with some mildly spicy mustard mayonnaise), with fried potato chunks on the side and homemade ketchup. The apple and rabbit sausage was really good. It was slightly peppery, and the apple cuboids were the size of rice grains. The rabbit part was very juicy, chewy, and sausage-like. It was kind of like eating a cow burger patty, but more fatty and chunky. I wonder which part of the rabbit they used. I would assume that the legs would be too muscular, thus rendering the patty too lean if they used it. But then, where do they use? The poached egg were great. The ciabatta was perfectly crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside, with lots of holes. The butter soaking into the ciabatta made me question why I never buy good butter to put onto my toast - or rather, why I never eat buttered toast in the first place. I also really enjoyed whatever mayonnaise sauce thing they threw on the other half of ciabatta.

The potatoes and ketchup were pretty good. Perfectly fried.

I also tried a slice of bacon which was pretty thick and not very fatty. It was pretty good but a bit too salty.

Overall, I currently do not regret adding rabbit to the list of animals I've consumed, though I think I prefer lamb more. The list is:

Cow

Pig

Chicken

Duck
Goose

Lamb

Various fish (eel, salmon, etc.), but not shark

Various other seafood and crustaceans (clams, mussels, oysters, squid, octopus, in various states of rawness)

Turkey

Quail

Snake

Turtle

Rabbit

Contrary to stereotypes, I have not tried kangaroo or dogs or cats. Possibly because of the stereotypes, I would prefer to keep it that way for now.

Rulloff's Restaurant

Yay, dinner at a restaurant-bar-type place: Rulloff's. Do I feel like an adult? Do I feel comfortable with a beer at the table (not on my side)?
What a peculiar lifestyle.
We sat at a table next to the only wall-window in the place. Happy Chowder-TV-show type music played in the background, which later switched into some sort of jazzy fling. There were ceiling fans, dim lighting, and a dusty cabinet.

I asked for clam chowder because I've had a fortnight-long craving for it (specifically, in a bread bowl, but they don't have bread bowls). However, I was later told that they had run out from lunch time. This was completely fine with me. I know this happens. At least they make it fresh?
AK (not to be confused with AK from high school) got French Onion Soup which tasted pretty good.

 He also got a pulled pork sandwich and sweet potato fries. The pulled pork sandwich came in a burger bun, which was unexpected but extremely tasty. I had no idea that pulled pork was so succulent and the BBQ
sauce wasn't overwhelmingly sweet. I also haven't had sweet potato fries in 2 years and these were excellent.

 Instead of clam chowder, I got the California burger with potato fries. The burger had a smidge of guacamole and baby sprouts which were pretty good since I've only ever had mung bean sprouts that look like this. The cow part was also really chewy and umami. It was a nice meal except I felt a bit hurried. Maybe I eat too slowly, or maybe the waitress was bored. We weren't left alone for more than 10 minutes at a time. I kinda wish the place was more crowded (though, as primarily(?) a bar, the place was near empty at 7 pm) so that I would've had an entire hour or two to nibble on food and people-watch.

Some Ice Cream Place

Somewhere between Ithaca NY and Geneva NY is this ice cream store that sells wine ice cream. As I am not of age, I didn't try any. However, they also have lots of other ice cream. I bought a "small" mint chip ice cream whose scoop ended up being larger than my fist. It was also only $2.60. I'm not sure whether they make all these normal ice cream flavors on-site though, because I saw a Hershey Ice Cream sign, and the mint ice cream tasted pretty normal.

The lady at the resgister seemed a bit irked and impatient but that might've been because there were 13 of us causing a ruckus and/or paying with card (which required signature).

I am unable to recall the name of the place and I can't find it on Yelp or Google Maps. It was somewhere between Geneva and Ithaca and I think it was a sky-blue cottage off the "highway".