Well, you’d get the WBC’s brunch outing at Sonora in Port Chester. How’d it shape up? Let’s find out together.
179 Rectory Street
Port Chester
New York 10573 (Map)
(914) 933 – 0200
Attendees: :jump_to_Sylvia:, :jump_to_Shelley:, :jump_to_Pat:, :jump_to_Andrew:, :jump_to_Jeff:
:a_Sylvia:
Sonora is yet another restaurant that serves brunch when it really shouldn’t. Brunch indicates that there will be breakfast items available as well as lunch items. Besides the pancakes and a huevos rancheros, there were no other breakfast dishes available. In fact, both the pancakes and the huevos rancheros weren’t even part of the brunch prix fixe menu.
Ultimatly we settled at a table outside, which was on a little enclosed deck. It was a nice day out, and the trees provided ample shade so no one was going to leave with a souvenir sunburn. I had a mango juice to start and snacked on some cheese puffs (a little dry and not the freshest) and corn meal cakes (pretty yummy) as I tried to decide what I wanted to eat.
There was a considerable lack of breakfast items on the menu I had in front of me. On the menu online, there were many breakfast options available, such as the Nuevo Latino Frittata that I was kind of looking forward to. But alas, what is shown on the online menu is vastly different than what the menu I was perusing now showed.
No matter what I was leaning towards, each dish came with a grilled skirt steak. Would this be an indication that maybe grilled skirt steak was their speciality? As much as I have been limiting my red meat intake lately, I figured I might as well just go for it. Given how I was feeling on my runs lately, a little extra iron from the steak might help.
I ordered the Cuba – Churrasco a caballo, which was part of the principal dish offerings, not part of the prix fixe. This churrasco was a grilled skirt steak topped with a quail egg, served with chino latino rice with lobster, diced sweet plaintain, bean sprouts in a saffron and garlic sauce.
I had ordered my skirt steak cooked medium rare. When it arrived, it didn’t look medium rare, but it was still as juicy as medium rare. The sauce that was served with it was excellent. Combined with the steak, each bite was wonderful. The chino latino rice was as expected. Similar to Chinese fried rice, except the mixings were shredded lobster meat, diced sweet plaintain and bean sprouts. It was served at room temperature, which is a bit off putting. I’ve had my fair share of cold fried rice, but when I order it in a restaurant, I kind of expect it to be hot. The rice was dry and a touch hard, but they were generous with the lobster meat, and I wished there was more sweet plaintain. Next time I make fried rice, I’m putting sweet plaintain into it. The little quail egg perched on top my rice was overcooked, which made it more rubbery than i would have liked.
While the food itself was pretty good, I was disappointed with the overall experience. The service was attentive, but I was really looking forward to something more breakfast-oriented as the online menu had shown. Instead I had steak as my first meal of the day, steak that was good, but really not what I was looking for. Would I go back for dinner? The meal was good, but was it good enough to rationalize a meal that would average about $30 a person good? Probably not. If high priced Latin food is to Latin Americans as high priced Chinese food is to me, I have a feeling I can get an equally great meal at half the price at a tiny place down the street from Sonora.
A little disappointed, we set our sights to dessert. I mean, what is WBC without dessert? So we piled into our two cars (two cars between the six of us. We were going green!) and headed up the road to Nari’s Bakery.
It was a busy bakery with display cases filled with cakes, mini desserts, and cookies. A lot of people were there for cakes, and to tell you the truth, the only reason I knew about this place was because of a cannoli cake that was presented at a work celebration. It was delicious. So here we were, hustled down the line, and before I had a chance to process everything that was available, it was my turn. I quickly ordered the first thing that came to mind, mini cannolis. I got two, one for me and one to bring back to my father, who also enjoys them. We paid, we stepped outside, and we ate. My cannoli was great. The cream was creamy and not super sweet, and the shell was nice and crunchy. I kept eyeing the second one in my bag, but I was a good daughter and fought the urge to devour it.
The czar says: Sonora needs a lesson from The Cookery, who does brunch right without sacrificing the cuisine that makes them worth the extra bucks. They also need to update their website. Would I go back for dinner? Maybe, if I wasn’t paying, and it was the other person’s choice. As good as that skirt steak was I think there are other places in Port Chester I’d rather go to. However, I will take a cake from Nari’s any day of the week. Cake can be a meal…right?
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:a_Shelley:
Sylvia, Jeff, and I drove up to Sonora on Sunday morning to see Andrew and Yuee waiting outside the restaurant. Why didn’t they go in and get our table, I wondered? The answer, we discovered, was because the front door was locked, despite it being 11am and despite Sonora stating that Sunday brunch begins at 11am. I peered through the window until I caught the attention of someone inside, who, in my opinion, seemed a little surprised that people had actually shown up at opening time to eat. When we got inside we stated that we had a reservation, although that was laughably unnecessary seeing as we were the only people for miles.
As we were led into the dining room, I deducted immediate points for the music selection. Being a Latin restaurant, I expected Sonora to have some, oh, I don’t know, Latin music playing. A little Spanish guitar, a little flamenco, perhaps. No. What was playing this morning was smooth jazz elevator music. It was, uh…it wasn’t good. We settled into a large round table in the corner, but when it was discovered by some other members of our party that there were some bugs about, our waitress offered us a different table. At this point I spied the totally empty enclosed patio out back and asked if we could sit outside. The waitress seemed to go through some internal hemming and hawing and told us that it would have to be cleaned first. Not a problem, we were waiting for Pat to show up anyway.
What felt like a long time later (I don’t know exactly how long, but I do know it was long enough for me to recount my latest adventure), we were led outside. This was pleasant, not only because we were away from that awful elevator muzak, but because we were seated in a shady spot, with a pleasant breeze blowing through the trees above us.
Menu time. What struck me was that this menu was different than the Sunday brunch menu that Sonora has posted on its website. The delicious-sounding Nuevo Latino Frittata Open omelet with cheddar cheese, chorizo and roasted pepper? Nowhere to be seen. Sonora’s good ol’ breakfast eggs, bacon, sausage, and home fries with salsita? Not a one in sight. This wasn’t the first time that the WBC has been disappointed by what I see as false advertising on the part of a restaurant. I voted to go to Sonora because the menu online looked intriguing. If a restaurant is going to go to the trouble of posting its menu online, it should put in the effort to ensure that the menu posted is a current one.
But, we were already there, so what was I going to do? I settled on a skirt steak and eggs dish from the prix fixe menu. I selected fresh lemonade as my breakfast beverage. The menu said I could get the eggs any style, so I ordered scrambled. I asked for my grilled Kansas skirt steak to be cooked medium-well. The dish would also come with corn and yucca hash brown finished with a saffron lime mojito.
While we waited we munched on some cheese puffs and corn cakes. I don’t know where the cheese was in said cheese puffs, but they were tasty nonetheless with some of accompanying strawberry jam that was brought to our table.
The food arrived and lo and behold, my scrambled eggs looked just like two sunnyside up eggs. Upon closer inspection I discovered that they weren’t just scrambled eggs that looked like sunnyside up eggs, they were, in fact, sunnyside up eggs. Yes, I could have sent the eggs back, but the time it would have taken for them to reprepare the dish didn’t seem worth it in comparison to my hunger level at that point. So I just ate the egg whites, leaving the runny yolks behind. The steak was four small pieces of steak, one of which was edible, the other three were much too charred. Yes, I asked for medium well, but I didn’t ask for full-on well or well-well. I didn’t appreciate the burned cripsy exterior of the steak.
The corn and yucca hash brown was pleasant. It wasn’t so much a hash brown in the traditional sense of the word as a tightly-packed mass of red-tinted potatoes, which had a pleasant spice to them. The saffron lime mojito sauce was also tasty, I just wish I had more edible pieces of steak to dip in it.
The best thing about my meal was the fresh lemonade. And I’m not sure that’s saying alot. Would I want to go back and pay $16.95 for another prix fixe? No. I might try Sonora again for lunch or dinner, but I don’t think they’re certain with what they’re doing for brunch.
Oh, and about that music. As we were leaving at about 1:00 (yup, it was another 2 hour WBC meal), we saw a live musician setting up with his guitar. Sigh. Had we know there would be live music eventually, maybe we would have pushed back our brunch time.
Fortunately, we, being the WBC, got dessert (but not at Sonora). We headed over to Neri’s Bakery on Pearl Street. This erased any bad taste from brunch. I selected a small slice of a light chocolate mousse cake, and it was dreamy. Light, creamy, delicious. Sylvia mentioned that Neri’s has a cannoli cake. I’ll definitely head back sometime to try that.
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:a_Pat:
What I Had: Pancakes with a dash of strawberries, Mango Smoothie
What It Cost: ~$20
Worth It: Nope
The Rating: 2.5/5
The Details:
Dear Brunch Purveyors of Westchester:
Pancakes have a special place in my heart. When I see them on a menu for brunch, it takes a great deal of willpower for me not to order them (assuming the restaurant serves real maple syrup of course). That said, I’ve noticed a rather disturbing trend lately. It seems the word “pancake” has a more variable definition to a number of restaurants throughout Westchester County, including, most recently, Sonora in Port Chester. These restaurants seem to believe that pancakes needn’t be large, fluffy, golden-brown, plate-filling discs of heaven.
Well let me be clear, THEY SHOULD LOOK LIKE THIS, NOT LIKE THIS. If they look like the second picture, THEY ARE SILVER DOLLARS! Those are shrunken, mini-pancakes which have merely a fraction of the taste and texture as regular pancakes do. DO NOT TELL ME YOU ARE SERVING PANCAKES AND THEN BRING ME DIMINUTIVE (and in Sonora’s case, slightly undercooked) IMPOSTERS! Real Pancake lovers will not stand for it.
Sincerely,
Patrick
Westchester Breakfast Club
P.S. Your restaurant had a lovely design, an attentive staff, and a lovely bowl of pastries at the start of the meal, and I’m willing to bet your dinner service is delightful. But fix your f#%$@*g pancakes or take them off the menu.
The Bottom Line: I’d try Sonora again. But not for Brunch.
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:a_Andrew:
On the outside Sonora looks like every other building on the street: a white, non-nondescript 2 story wood-sided house. On the inside: a Tuscan villa styled dining area with warm orange tones accented by hardwood furniture.
We elected to eat out on the semi-private patio which was nicely shaded by tall shrubbery. While Sonora had all the hallmarks of a great restaurant to impress a date, its relativity new addition of brunch was a half-harted addition at best.
The brunch menu was basically a cut down version of their dinner menu with eggs added on. No real innovation here except skirt steak for brunch, and it was delicious. They slapped an over-easy quail egg on some rice and felt that made the dish breakfasty, but they were not fooling anyone, it was still a mini-dinner. The brunch prix-fixe did come with a drink, I had wonderful mango smoothie that was prepared with fresh mango. All in all the meal was delightful at a decent price point of about $17. The only complaint I have are about people who think ring-tones from Geico commercials are the cat’s pajamas.
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:a_Jeff:
Sonora? More like, Snore… AH!
Well, that pun didn’t work as well as my last one. I’m trying. I’ve become very busy with Grad School, so my reviews have been lacking. I apologize for this. Either way, I’m here to review the food.
I had some sort of steak with a quail egg. To me, and egg is an egg whether it comes out of a chicken or a quail. It all tastes the same to me. I ordered my steak medium rare, but it came out medium. That didn’t really bother me too much. What bothered me was that it was more of a lunch than a brunch. It’s more like Sonora is trying to open to the breakfast crowd, but the chef can’t figure out how to make a good brunch menu. Keep trying Sonora! You’ll get it eventually.
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