We recently visited Canoe, the quintessential historic Vinings restaurant, situated on the banks of the Chattahoochee River on Paces Ferry Road in Vinings. Canoe is a wonderful restaurant for those special occasions, such as weddings, receptions and private celebrations. Canoe offers a seasonal contemporary American cuisine with a wide selection of seafood and meats, anything from trout to rabbit. The restaurant is certainly unique, Southern but contemporary.
We were seated promptly with a view of the river. We were immediately greeted by Canoe’s manager and presented with their extensive wine list. After perusing their menu, we selected a lovely Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc to go with our dinner along with a bottle of San Pellegrino. We started off with a scrumptious African squash soup. The soup was mellow and warming to the palate with a pizzazz of flavor from the citrus cream dollup, toasted squash seeds and squash seed oil drizzled over the top. You’ll also enjoy the large selection of breads that are occasionally brought to your table.
For our entrees, we selected the Georgia Mountain Trout with goat’s cheese, homemade tortellini and the Seared Yellowfin Tuna with fresh hearts of palm, snow peas, wild mushroom and shoyu vinaigrette. The Georgia Mountain Trout was absolutely wonderful, very hearty and scrumptious. The Seared Yellowfin Tuna was a good complement to the Georgia Mountain Trout. It was a taste explosion. The tuna was seared perfectly to medium rare and the shoyu vinaigrette added a nice kick along with the wild mushroom ragout, the hearts of palm and the snow peas.
We wrapped up the evening with Valrhona Chocolate Souffle Cake with a warm goat cheese center and sweet lemon ice cream. Doesn’t sound like something you’d normally select, but the large group next to our table had just tried about every dessert on the menu and raved about it. As generally happens, when you get excited about something it doesn’t meet your expectations. We found the thought nice, but the amount of goat cheese was so minimal it wasn’t really noticeable and the souffle itself was a little overcooked.
Even though the desert was a disappointment, we were very happy with our evening at Canoe and found the appetizer and entrees to be exquisite. I would highly recommend that if you haven’t been to Canoe before, put it at the top of your list.
I’d rank it with 4.5 stars (out of 5).