3-Course Vegetarian Lunch at Alvarado Main Brew Pub in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget
Alvarado on Main Brew Pub in Salinas, California is well known for entrées like wagyu smash burgers and salmon yakisoba, but you can also eat a three-course vegetarian meal here with regular menu items.
Market day on Saturday mornings is an especially good time for a vegetarian lunch at Alvarado on Main. The market begins in front of the brewpub, but you can park in the nearby garage by the Steinbeck Center, which is just two blocks away on Main Street.
The day my daughter Florence Paget, husband Laurent, and I went to lunch, we began our meal with crispy, long pretzels that came with warm bar cheese for dipping. Lacto-ovo vegetarians eat dairy and eggs, so this was a great vegetarian beginning for market day lunch.
I ordered blackberry-burrata salad as my main dish. Burrata cheese comes from Apulia (also known as Puglia) Italy, which is located in the heel of Italy’s boot-shaped peninsula on Italy’s eastern coast by the Adriatic Sea. It is served as a large disc of milky white cow’s cheese with a thick soft layer of edible crust surrounding a creamy interior.
Alvarado on Main inserts blackberries into the creamy interior of the burrata cheese from the bottom of the burrata. The cheese is placed in the center of a large bowl of baby spinach leaves that have been mixed with sautéed shallots. Blackberry halves were scattered around the burrata on top of the baby spinach and shallots.
The salad was so beautiful to look at that I kept rearranging it for artistic presentation each time I took a delicious bit. Blackberries and burrata cheese could be a dessert on their own. The crunchy spinach leaves and salty shallots added to the surprising and pleasing sweetness of this dish. I think an iced tea would be perfect with the blackberry-burrata salad.
I shared a vegetarian and antioxidant dessert with Laurent – a stout brownie with pineapple ice cream. Stout here refers to a brownie made with a frothy and chocolaty beer. Adding beer to a brownie recipe makes the brownies very moist.
The brownie we ate had a pronounced chocolate flavor, which makes me think it was made with bitter baking chocolate, which is a strong antioxidant.
This already great dessert came with whipped cream and caramelized slices of fresh pineapple that were sautéed in butter and brown sugar and candied shavings of coconut.
That glorious dessert was also vegetarian. It was high-calorie, but worth the off-diet delight. The stout brownie would be great with coffee alone as a “sugar meal” as the Austrians say.
This delicious vegetarian meal is a winner that you can order everyday from the regular menu at Alvarado on Main brewpub in Salinas, California.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
