Restaurants

DINING OUT: Still among the toast of the town

French Toast has long been considered one of central Illinois’ finest restaurants, and a recent visit confirmed this – even with the addition of a few casual menu items and the sprouting up of outdoor cafe tables.

Dining Out last visited in 2001, long before Peoria Heights was considered "restaurant row" by some. Now, French Toast is sitting right in the center of a quaint and trendy dining mecca.

The interior is a long and narrow space that opens with a large lounge area. Toward the back are clusters of tables swathed in white cloth, with full place settings and bulbous wine glasses on long stems. There are large paintings on the walls and lighted china cabinets, and the plaster on one wall looks like cake frosting.

The menus are mounted in leather books and full of inspiring dishes, heavy on the seafood – macadamia crusted scallops, almond and herb-crusted tilapia, Chilean sea bass with mango salsa, seafood gratin with scallops, shrimp and crab in a mushroom sauce. There are also steaks, pork, lamb and chicken.

We started with a new item, Creole crab cakes ($12). They were delicious; large pieces of crab lumped together into a patty that was lightly browned on the outside and served with lemon wedges and a small cup of remoulade that was spicy, but not right away – the heat only hits you after a few bites. Surprisingly, it went well with our wine selections: the Scarlet of Paris Pinot Noir and the Shadow Ridge house Cabernet (both $5).

We ordered salads next. My guest had a house salad: mixed greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes and croutons. It was quite large for a side salad, and so was my Georgia peach salad ($9), an army of impossibly sweet peach slices fanned across a bed of mixed greens. There was Italian prosciutto and sugared nuts on the side, and the peaches were covered in a thyme vinaigrette. This is one of the new menu items and was probably one of the most exciting dinner salads I’ve ever had. Our server also brought us dinner rolls and a cup of butter pats shaped like flowers.

For dinner, my guest ordered one of the specials, a 10-oz. New York strip with mashed potatoes. The dish was $19.95 and included the house salad mentioned above, which is $5 on the menu. She liked the steak very much; it was tender, juicy and cooked perfectly.

I ordered the roasted duck breast ($22), a narrow cut that was sliced into coins. It was served with a cherry reduction that was not too tart, not too sweet. There were whole cooked cherries on the plate, along with perky asparagus and roasted red potatoes.

Our server offered dessert, so we tried the flourless chocolate cake ($6), which came with a dollop of whipped cream and two large strawberries on a polka-dotted plate. The bananas foster ($6), a mound of vanilla ice cream surrounded by slices of warm, sugary bananas, was tasty.

French Toast has recently lowered some of their menu prices (on the old menu, the duck was $27), and on Friday the owners are introducing appetizers and salads next door at Wine Country. General manager Jennifer Hand had said in a previous Journal Star story that French Toast has added casual menu items to fit in with this area along Prospect Avenue. But the service is still on par with what French Toast has been in the past. Our waiter was efficient, replacing used forks without even being noticed, and the courses were choreographed nicely.

As we dined, we noticed that diners in flip-flops received the same service as the impeccably dressed ones. An atmosphere like this, along with the amazing food, should keep French Toast at the top of the Peoria Heights heap.