Stone Cellar (revisited):Appleton, Wisconsin

(Her)  I’ll be honest, Stone Cellar wasn’t my first choice for our New Year’s Eve dinner.  In fact, I really wanted Sai Ram’s Indian food  and was pretty disappointed we weren’t going.  For practical reasons however, we decided that since we were seeing a show at Skyline Comedy Club located in the very same building as Stone Cellar and since we would be pressed for time, it would make more sense to eat at the Stone Cellar.  I can’t argue with practicality.
Classy people that we are, I promptly ordered a homemade diet root beer to drink and a soft pretzel with cheese for an appetizer. I rarely pass up the opportunity to order soft pretzels and these were delicious with a nice dark crust on the outside.  Okay, but not great.  The cheese sauce appeared to be homemade as well and was quite tasty although a bit runny and hard to get it to stick to my morsels in the quantity that I would have wanted.   For my entree I ordered one of the specials and went “surf n turf”. My turf consisted of two perfectly seasoned 4oz Meyer fillet medallions topped with fresh sauteed mushrooms.  For those of you who aren’t in the know (myself included because I just Googled this) Meyer Angus are a certified humane, vegetarian fed, no hormones or antibiotics, dry aged cut of meat that are known for their “juiciness, tenderness, flavor and consistent portion sizing.”  In my version, Meyer steaks have got to be the most tasty melt in your mouth piece of steak I have ever eaten.  It’s the kind of bite that makes you question all the other steaks you have had in your life and realize that you can’t ever go back to cooking just any old steak at home.  The rest of the meal was rounded off with mashed potatoes, asparagus and the “surf”–5 snow crab claws.  So that none of you think that I was deliriously swayed by the meat and can’t give an accurate portrayal now, I will say that the mashed potatoes lacked flavor and salt.  I would have loved to have thrown some bleu cheese in there and amped up the garlic in order to compliment the meat.  The crab claws were extremely sweet and yummy and as a testament to their freshness and tenderness, I didn’t even have to use butter.  Know this however, the real star of the meal was the steak.

I’m not really a foodie so much as I just like to eat good food.  I must admit that I also had to Google “Grand Cru” when I got home so I could be in the know when writing this article.  The other entree option was a “Grand Cru” Lamb goulash served over späetzle and I wanted to know what I was missing.  By now, all those wine snobs must be scoffing down their upturned noses at me (when they aren’t busy sniffing bouquets  and in between their notes of oak and fresh cut grass).  What do I know? I don’t drink and I grew up in Wisconsin.  Now that I know that “Grand Cru” means that the wine has the highest classification of  wines from Burgundy or Alsace; I’m intrigued.  I do like wine in food.  Is it necessary to use such a fancy wine in your lamb goulash?  I don’t know.  Will I use my new found knowledge to appear educated and snobby the next time I see the term “Grand Cru” and ask which wine they are using? Of course, but even when they tell me the name of the wine I’ll have to run home to Google that too.

Ambience…..8.9  Food…..9.002  Value….7.32  Service……9.345

Editors note: while searching for an image to use I discovered this article mentioning that Stone Cellar was making a “grand cru beer” using rock candy….now I’m starting to think they just toss this term around willy nilly.