Light eaters should come during happy hour for small snacks and manageable portions of menu hits: the famous bacon and shrimp risotto, for instance. It's just a Caesar salad, and sometimes, that's all I want. The Amadeus Caesar is $4.50 and exceptional, with croutons, curls of shaved parmesan, garlicky housemade dressing and nothing else no one grilled the romaine, there's no confusing fried egg tossed with the croutons, no one decided to put fish sauce in the dressing (though, let's be real, I bet that'd be delicious). This phenomenon occurs throughout the Amadeus menu, with dishes like a plain old Caesar salad, an inside joke among real food lovers who quietly shame the spice-abhorring normies who order $20 Caesars at restaurants. My dining companion wished she'd left some for leftovers. But for some reason, Amadeus’s polenta and tea-smoked brisket, tossed in ancho-chili cream sauce with balsamic reduction is so good, it’s the kind of dish I crave after long days. For a while, it was boring, the way hummus is now, the way poke will be in, I don’t know, three years? Maybe I miss it, now that it’s evaporated from Culinaria. It was everywhere: seasoned with orange juice and guajillo, rubbed with African spices and grilled, or braised with red wine and trumpet mushrooms. Once upon a time, the hot menu item was beef and polenta: brisket or beef shoulder specifically, slow cooked and plopped on a pile of polenta. I would venture to say Amadeus is every food lover’s favorite secret, unassuming on Liberty, where you can always find a table and a relaxing meal. The menu is themeless and large - it fits on one page, but just barely - and most items range from the outwardly simple (macaroni and cheese, risotto) to the surprisingly adventurous (mousse is not often a word I see used to describe a sandwich condiment). Drinks are serious they’d be half the size at most restaurants of this caliber, and nowhere near as strong. You may encounter the mother-daughter ownership team, Diana Ramallo and Alena Stewart, or maybe Stewart's son will deliver your food. Instead, Amadeus is the kind of restaurant where water glasses are always full, where servers know to let you dine, where you can find the perfect Caesar salad or polenta or any of the dishes that are so unfashionable and yet so unabashedly excellent when taken seriously. Amadeus cheekily refers to itself as a “fork to mouth” restaurant: a play on “farm to table” or “nose to tail” dining, as if to say, "We need no gimmick here." Its social media presence is less than pronounced its menu includes only a handful of buzzwords (two points for “harissa,” one point for "slider"). It's these times when I walk across the street to Amadeus.ĭowntown's Amadeus restaurant isn't trying to be trendy. It's an exciting time to be downtown - but every once in a while, it's nice to breathe without inhaling someone else's newest marketing shtick. The "revitalization of downtown" is every restaurateur's favorite hot take, dropping words like "niche" and comparing themselves to Portland. B.V.Walking down Liberty Street, you can feel the buzz of restaurants reverberate through you, whether you like it or not.