Mezzanine
Visit Carytown here in Richmond, and you can dine with other localvores at Mezzanine 3433, a restaurant serving creative, locally-sourced cuisine.
I started with their tomato stack (a seemingly reconstructed sliced tomato, with slices interleaved with cheese), a play on a caprese salad, which was good. Even better was a refreshing cocktail that was icy cold (apropos for the night I dined here) and tart.
The fried green tomatoes were good too, but overall there were far too many tomatoes and too little of the accompanying crabmeat salad. Both appetizers needed salt.
For my entrée I tried their special featuring two large crab cakes with a bacony potato salad. The potato salad came with a serious kick of spice that I enjoyed, but since bacon was a featured ingredient, I could have used more of that. Again, salt was needed to really flavor this food. The crab cakes were well-browned, but ultimately too big consider the amount of sauce presented on the plate. That really is a very weak complaint. The sauce was good. Provide more!
I wouldn’t have ordered this dish again, if it became mainstream: there were too many instances of finding shell in my crabcakes. That turned me off.
We also ordered a menu entrée of short ribs, and that was stupendous. It has a delicious sweet sauce, and the short ribs weren’t too greasy, and had that most tender texture that’s hard to come by, without any bones getting in the way.
So, while not a perfect first visit at Mezzanine 3433, I will go back. Seasoning can always be corrected with a stealth salt cellar and I really support using fresh, locally-provisioned ingredients.