The Bent Page

Amuse Bistro in Aruba serves up inspired food as I discovered last night. So, let’s get right to it because there’s a lot of eye-candy here for you foodies. We sat down with a couple of generously-poured glasses of wine and along comes a little treat from the chef, a shot glass size sample of the potato soup. This was a great little palette teaser. Perusing the menu (which is shown at the end of this post) you’ll see there are many choices here. Well, we started with escargots as seen below:

Amuse Bistro, Aruba, escargots

Those little buggers were tasty and backed up by neatly sliced bread in an inventive way. There was also a chicken salad topped by a slice of crispy pancetta as seen in the next photo:

And then there was this inventive dish: Goat cheese with red bell pepper atop a puff pastry with sugared black olives. Check it out.

Yeah, that’s a chef who knows what he’s doing. Right? Of course! Now, let’s move on to the main course. I decided to go with appetizer size portions for the main course to save room for dessert. Here we go with a roast pork loin cooked EXACTLY right as you see here:

Amuse Bistro, Aruba, roast pork loin.

When I say that was cooked exactly right, I mean that you could cut it with a fork and each bite was full of flavor. Speaking of flavor, take a look at the shrimp and lobster linguine in the next picture:

Amuse Bistro, lobster/shrimp linguine (appetizer portion)

That was a nice combination as well. Moving along you see the scallops plated beautifully:

Amuse Bistro, Aruba, scallops.

Another work of culinary art there, eh? Absolutely. At last we get to dessert, which was a brownie with red wine ice-cream. Here you go:

Amuse Bistro, Aruba, brownie with red wine ice-cream.

All in all, a very fine meal, served by a staff that is highly professional. In fact, the staff was as much a pleasure as the food. They described the dishes, offered suggestions, and kept things moving at the perfect pace. Here I post the menu so you can see the very fair prices and options currently offered.

Amuse Bistro, Aruba, current menu.

Perhaps what I liked most about this (and there is A LOT to like) was the option to have appetizer size portions for entrees. These days I like to eat a variety of dishes and by having smaller portions I was able to make it through to dessert. In fact, next time I go to Amuse, which will be soon, I’m thinking about ordering several different appetizer to start and several more for the main courses and sharing them across the table like a family-style meal. There are lots of choices here and every one is good. Why hold back? Bon dia.