Restaurants change. They expand. They add lunch or brunch. They make adjustments to the menu.
Hoot, Toot and Whistle, on Delray Beach’s East Atlantic Avenue restaurant strip, lowered prices by 20 percent.
“My goal is to become a more friendly, more fun place to meet and eat,” one of the partners said in a letter to the Sun-Sentinel earlier this year.
So back we went to Hoot, Toot and Whistle. If you haven’t yet figured it out, the restaurant is decorated in a railroad theme. There’s even a train that runs around the elegant dining room.
We were meeting no one. But we did come to eat, which at this point in the restaurant’s history seems like a side note to the music, which starts at 7:30 p.m. By 8:30, there’s a crowd at the bar, most in shorts, many of whom seemed to have started drinking hours earlier.
We decide to sit at the bar, until too many wobbly dancers brush our table, overcome, it seems, by the musicians’ loud renditions of Michael Jackson, Average White Band and James Taylor. This is not my kind of music, so we ask to be moved.
It’s much quieter in the back of the restaurant, but one waiter seems to be working the entire room.
We start with steamed pork and chicken dumplings with hot ginger broth and oriental vegetables ($6.95). Like every dish here, it is plated beautifully. Four dumplings swim in perfectly chopped vegetables. The bowl is suitably Asian. But the filling is bland. The jumbo shrimp and lump crabmeat martini with cocktail sauce ($11.50) is gorgeous. But the sauce is too hot for my dining partner.
The menu is partly continental, partly fusion. Appetizers include escargot in garlic butter with puff pastry ($6.95) and Thai lobster spring rolls with glass noodle slaw and sweet chili sauce ($7.95).
When our entrees arrive, we start to see part of the problem here. It’s as if a food stylist and a food chemist got together to create these dishes. But they forgot the artistry of food, the importance of texture and temperature, the meeting of strong flavors with complimentary flavors.
Tandoori tuna ($21.95) has that wonderful orange cast of a tandoori oven, but the fish is tough and served not quite warm. The accompanying sushi-style rice is wrapped in nori but tastes as though it was wrapped hours ago. Everything on the plate tastes the same. It’s served on a plastic Asian-looking plate. Plastic doesn’t heat, so the dish is quickly cold.
A pork chop ($17.95) is served with sweet potatoes, braised cabbage, green beans and Granny Smith applesauce. The only preparation note is “flamed.” We probably should have asked what it meant, but as far as I can tell it means smoked and dry.
Hoot, Toot and Whistle has trouble with protein, the centerpiece of all of its main plates. Perhaps if we’d shared a bottle of wine from the restaurant’s impressively lengthy wine list it would have all gone down much easier.
Though our waiter seems unsure of whether the desserts are made on premises, we order a chocolate brownie martini served with Godiva chocolate liqueur, ice cream and hot fudge ($7.95) and caramel apple pie ($6.95) served with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce. It’s not easy eating a brownie out of a martini glass. The pie was the best thing I tried here. When I called the restaurant after my visit, they told me that 90 percent of the desserts are made in house.
Restaurants change. It’s tough doing business on a street with so many choices, especially out of season.
Please phone in advance to confirm information on hours, prices, menu items and facilities. For review consideration, please fax a current menu that includes name and address of restaurant to 954-356- 4386 or send to Sun-Sentinel, 200 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301-2293.
John Tanasychuk can be reached at or 954-356-4632 or by writing to him at the Sun-Sentinel.
