Best deal this week: $5 tapas at Rendezvous

$5 tapas. This might just be the best deal ever. Every Monday night from 5 to 10 p.m., Rendezvous in Central Square offers $5 tapas at their bar. The menu changes every week, but tonight Rendezvous is serving up dishes like grilled swordfish with toasted cumin seeds and preserved lemon, baby brussel sprouts with extra virgin olive oil, Merguez sausage with yogurt sauce, quince and pomegranate, and salty head-on shrimp with garlic and chili oil. You could easily split four to five of these tapas amongst two people, and walk out the door with a bill for $25 or less!

I've been to Rendezvous once before (on Valentine's Day), and the food was excellent. You know those restaurants that you can just tell when they're using high quality (and sometimes even local) ingredients? Rendezvous is that kind of restaurant.

Will you be taking advantage of Rendezvous' $5 tapas tonight? Share your review with us if you go!

Regaling at Rendezvous on Valentine's Day

Rendezvous in Central Square helped to make my Valentine's Day extra special - as did the person I dined with.  Zach's parents gave me a gift certificate to Rendezvous for Christmas, so Valentine's Day was the perfect opportunity for us to try out a new, fancier restaurant together that we wouldn't normally go to. The menu at Rendezvous seems to change often, but when we went on Sunday, the options included alluring options such as crispy roast chicken with horseradish mashed potatoes and skillet-roasted skate wing with baby brussel sprouts. Since Zach is a vegetarian (and in an effort to stay within the price of the gift certificate), we decided to order a bottle of wine and several appetizers to share. 

The wine we ordered was recommended by our waitress - we told her we wanted a white, dry wine and she immediately suggested the Domaine Du Tariquet Sauvignon Blanc. 

The wine was crisp with light notes of citrus and oak. Definitely a great recommendation.

We ended up ordering a total of four appetizers for our meal, and our waitress brought out two at a time, which was a great way to elongate the meal/experience. The first two that came out included the Boston lettuce salad with apples, cheddar cheese, spiced pecans and cider vinaigrette ($10), as well as the selection of three farmhouse cheeses from Formaggio Kitchen ($12).

The salad was surprisingly exciting, thanks to the tangy cider vinaigrette and necessarily spicy pecans.

The cheese plate, however, was incredible. The plate included blue cheese, creamy goat cheese and another kind that I sadly cannot remember, but each piece was insanely fresh, full of flavor, and accompanied the raisins and almonds on the side very well.

The final two plates that we ordered were the vegetable antipasto with roasted eggplant puree and muhummara ($11), along with the black truffle risotto with aged Mahon cheese ($13).

The vegetable antipasto dish was the perfect size for two people to taste, and included potatoes, spicy coleslaw, yogurt with cucumber sauce, and brussel sprouts, to name a few. The dish had a lot going on, but wasn't overly complicated.

I, unfortunately, dug into the black truffle risotto after my stomach capacity was near full, but the dish was still creamy, cheesy, and perfectly cooked, with a slight background flavor of the treasured black truffles.

By the end of the meal, we were stuffed and slap happy. The food was outstanding, but our waitress was also extremely informative, attentive, and patient. We definitely experienced five star dining that made a special holiday that much more special.