City Restaurant Week: Ameritage

EDITOR'S NOTE: City Restaurant Week continues through Saturday. Keep reading Second Helpings for more reviews. Staffers will be grabbing tables at all participating eateries.

Coming soon: Deep Blue, Mikimotos and Cafe Mezzanotte.

By ERIC RUTH

At a time of year when the two-faced spring climate conspires to create a transition phase in our appetites, a place like Ameritage Restaurant & Lounge seems to understand our dilemma.

Fresh, light, bright Latin-esque tastes fill the menu of this cooly hip center-city refuge, but a few options also heed our need to stoke the fires with more substantive food.

Take the earthy (and somewhat underseasoned) black bean soup, unmistakably hand-crafted and brightened by accents of a pork pate "crouton." Or consider the excellent skirt-steak wrap, given just enough beany/chewy starchiness and snappy herbal presence to accent the beautifully charred beef.

Perhaps partly because of the need to keep costs under control, the Restaurant Week menu here is infested with freshly dressed lettuces and crunchy raw veggies, even in the main dishes -- an inclination that suits the time of year (and our waistlines), but may be inclined to result in vegetative overload, depending on your choice.

Arugula and kohlrabi salad with cilantro vinaigrette would satisfy most folks without such a massive foundation of mashed avaocado, and there's no need to throw a pile of lettuce next to the excellent smoked chicken sandwich with bacon and apple -- especially when we've probably already had our first-course salad.

The solution is easy -- ignore any excessive green-ness, and enjoy how Ameritage shows a remarkable hand at balancing tart-light flavors. A sweet-snappy-light character lifts several dishes.

In the case of the smoked chicken sandwich, that fresh character is countered well by a nicely toothy grilled roll -- though that same roll threatened to overwhelm the somewhat dry fried-shrimp Po-Boy sandwich, which cried out for more of the creamy sexiness its yellow-pepper aioli promised.

Bottom-line sentiments pronounced Ameritage's efforts highly worthy of exploration, though next time, we'll take another course.

We'll definitely sit upstairs -- where everybody seems to gravitate. We'll also hope for maybe a bit more sass and fire. And we'll definitely promise ourselves to try this under-appreciated downtown gem more often.