Zoot, we totally LYLAS

Remember yearbook day in junior high? Remember how you'd earmark the pages with your BFFs on them? Remember how you’d find your name in the index and scan each page with your photos, almost overtaken with mammoth anticipation? Remember?

Yeah, us neither. But if we were still in junior high, and Zoot Restaurant was in our class, we would totally sign its yearbook with the message, “DON’T EVER CHANGE.”

While other restaurants come and go, Zoot’s decade-and-a-half of deliciousness and amazing service under chef/owners Stewart Scruggs and Mark Paul is reassuring. We were fortunate enough to join two wonderful friends in celebrating their eleventh (steel) anniversary party at Zoot Friday night where we enjoyed (among many crossed forks and plates) country and chicken liver pates, crab tortellini with preserved lemon froth, wood-grilled tuna with avocado couscous and roasted pacific snapper with ricotta agnolotti. Four and a half hours, five wine selections and countless belly laughs later, the evening culminated in a dessert of miniature truffle, strawberry and lemon biscuits served with three delicious honeys. We were already swollen when dessert arrived, but we persevered and ate our nine biscuits. We also never change.

In other news, we were unfortunate enough to believe the hype this weekend and bought some Metromint Peppermint Water. The sign at Central Market confidently screamed that it had been featured on the Food Network! The packaging was fancy! The product was, regrettably, unpleasant. In its yearbook, maybe a fake but polite message like, “We never knew each other that well but have a good summer anyway!”

Image (c) Kevin Dini