Sonoma Scores on its Cheese Board

I used to work for a pretty cool ad agency that was located super close to Town Center in Virginia Beach. All of our important client meetings took place at Sonoma Wine Bar and Bistro. I’ve been a long-time fan of the establishment for lunch and dinner. Last night while shopping for house décor we settled on a late dinner at Sonoma.

Sonoma’s cheese board has evolved since the first time I had it. There are now options which to me are really cool since I’m not a huge fan of strong cheeses like goat or blue. With the options I don’t have to waste. The cheese board we started with last night was AWESOME. I could eat it for dinner every night! We enjoyed the saucission (which is a French sausage, much like salami), duck prosciutto, Quadrella di Buffalo and Primo Sale Fresco (which were both tasty mild cheeses). The board comes with Nicoise olives, cornichons (which are tiny little pickles), candied walnuts, dried figs and honey (oh man the honey was good). I sampled it all, including the olives which I generally don’t like, but these were actually good.

I was super excited to see the peach caprese salad on the menu. I’ve always longed to love tomatoes more just so I could enjoy a caprese salad. I adore mozzarella and basil. So the first time I saw the peach version on the Sonoma menu – I had to have it. I’m not sure if it is running since it is peach season or if it’s been added to the menu for good. None the less, last night it was delicious. Thank you Sonoma for giving me a version of the salad I can enjoy.

By this time, I was pretty full but I still had my entrée coming in which I ordered the panko fried flounder with orange sesame basmati rice, grilled baby Bok Choy and blood orange Serrano coulis topped with a marinated cucumber salad. The fish portion was huge, two large filets. The marinated cucumber salad was perfect, cool and tangy. The rest to me seemed a little bland. I know flounder is a pretty tasteless fish but there is potential there for seasoning and the Bok Choy was just uninspired. It barely looked cooked. My suggestion would be to beef up the coulis on the plate.