For Restaurant Week, Citrea is offering a three-course meal at the price of $12 and $25 for lunch and dinner, respectively. This year for Restaurant Week, in addition to its popular specialty pizzas, the restaurant has added new features to its menu, along with a few old classics to tickle not only the taste buds of new patrons, but also appease the palates of regulars who know what they want before they even sit down. Your choices, however, depend on whether you decide to stop by for lunch or dinner, as the dinner menu boasts a little more variety.
To start off my dinner, I ordered the lobster slider — one of the new additions to the Restaurant Week dinner menu — and to say it was delicious would be an understatement. The bun was warm and perfectly toasted, while the lobster salad filling in between had a freshly balanced blend of mayo and lobster meat with a subtle hint of scallion and coleslaw cabbage that left a nice, mildly sweet aftertaste in my mouth. The plate was finished off with a small side of house chips. The only drawback to this seafood delight was its portion size: a single slider was finished in three bites.
Being a lover of seafood, for my second course, I ordered the Citrea Pizza: a white pie with shrimp, jalapeños, lemon and chives. While the baked shrimp, lemon skins and chives proved to be a surprising and enjoyable combination, the flavor of the pizza as a whole lacked a satisfying punch. The heat of the jalapeños was a zesty addition, but I still found myself constantly reaching for garlic powder and Parmesan cheese to add more flavor. The crust of the pizza, though at first soft and doughy, leaned a little toward the thick and rubbery side as it started to cool down, with the center almost too thin to hold on to its toppings.
For dessert, I sampled the zeppoles and the cannolis. The cannolis were a little underwhelming to look at. Again, the main issue here was the portion size; I was served two cannolis that were each the size of my index finger. The taste, however, made up for the look of the dish, with crispy outer shells, dark chocolate chips and ricotta filling.
The highlight of the zeppoles was the Nutella drizzle on the top. No one can deny Nutella, and when it’s on fried dough, the will to keep from scarfing down the entire bowl in one bite is a task fit for champions.
Citrea, for the most part, has got something good going. Despite a few points against my meal, I enjoyed it enough to want to come back a second time and perhaps try something different, maybe another pizza. The Restaurant Week menu is good, and the service and atmosphere are warm and welcoming, but for $25, the portion sizes could be a bit bigger.