Crepes De Luxe (West Side Market)
 Cleveland, Ohio        Date of Visit  10/26/12          http://www.crepesdeluxe.com/

Okay. We are at restaurant 300. We have a place picked out and some folks interested in celebrating along with us. It will be our 300th in spirit but not in number. Long ago we discovered it would be highly unlikely or an incredible pain to celebrate things on the day designated. Since then we have had much more fun waiting til things made sense and celebrating then. It also typically allows us to celebrate more…so instead of waiting to get everyone together we are going to plan the nice dinner out and mark the numerical passing with three weekend stops. I’m fond of the way we do things…AND a pile of us should be dining on the lake in the near future.
 

Our first stop is back as the West Side Market for a little stand that was closing the last time we attempted to patronize them. Crepes De Luxe seems to be connected to the coffee/tea shop right next door. We know we are headed to early dinner close by but having read then menu still decide on two savory and two sweet crepes. We didn’t get through all of any of them, one of which really made me sad.

The woman behind the counter was nice enough to ring all four thin cakes together and hold off on making the sweet versions until we had the chance to taste the savory options. All of the crepes are formed on commercial style round griddles which look like cast iron drum heads and the batter is spread with tiny polo mallet looking sticks. Once set enough to flip, they get turned, topped and folded into paper which get inserted in little cardboard sleeves which appear to be made just for something like this French street food. Some street foods are easy to eat…hotdogs/this or that on a stick. Some are not…soup/these crepes. Easy to hold, but the tender pancake is nearly impossible to lift from the sleeve and the innards all succumb to gravity and burrow for the unreachable netherworlds. Much more difficult than expected.
 

There was nothing wrong with the savory crepes, but they were just so-so at best. The La Chevre was filled with baby spinach, tomato and goat cheese. I love tomatoes and goat cheese. I prefer raw spinach to cooked but this wasn’t stewed past oblivion. There just wasn’t enough of any of them to balance out the savory crepe batter. Ehhh. The Montréal was a little better with very little Emmental cheese and slices of smoked brisket. The brisket had a strong peppery punch which stood up to the crepe but easily overpowered everything else in the sleeve.
 

The sweet crepes were incredible improvements. The Pears Caramel which also included walnuts was wrapped in a sweeter batter and it may show my Americaness, but it certainly seems the whole idea of the crepe was created for sweet applications and suffers some in other translations. Now the one I was seriously sad to drop into the waste receptacle was the Citron Crème, especially since again the majority of the goodies had slid to the bottom of the whole mess. I might have tried harder with a table or silverware or scuba gear. Regardless the magic potion here was lemon curd and honey sweetened mascarpone cheese. I would eat that on almost anything. If I knew dinner was going to be such a mixed experience I would have found a way to eat it all…and maybe another. Worth a stop…but stay sweet my friends.