YUM - York Street Dallas

Doesn't this look like a dish out of the pages of Gourmet? It's the plate of mussels that A ordered as an appetizer at York Street on Saturday. The restaurant is tiny...12 tables, almost on top of each other...but the food is amazing. I'm still swooning over what I ate, but as good as the food was, the wines (we had pairings) were even better. None of the rest of my pics of the meal turned out (problems with the automatic focus on my point and shoot), but I'll go ahead and describe what we had, starting with a gratis taster of a Riesling that left me wanting more. This was accompanied by salted walnuts that momentarily had me worried. I found them very ordinary, and A agreed...but then we tasted the small green olives that are prepared there and are so delicious they could be addictive. These were followed by the mussels for A and steak tartare for me. The mussels were incredible; the steak tartare was perfectly prepared insofar as the meat was concerned, however, it was a little bland. It was served with dark bread toast points on the side. I would have liked a little chopped onion and I swear I am going to start carrying my own salt, because just a crumble of sea salt would have brought out the flavor, and it needed that. On the other hand, the wine pairing for this was an incredibly smooth Northern Italian red made with Lagrein grapes. That was so good that as soon as I got home, I went online looking for a place to buy it. For the main course, A had sweetbreads with mushrooms smothered in a delicious, light, cream sauce, with wonderful pickled beets on the side, paired with a New Zealand Pinot Noir; I had scallops in a cream sauce that I would happily have crawled right into, with cut up, tossed avocado salad on the side, paired with a white that, although crisp and perfect for the dish, I didn't make note of because I'm partial to reds. We each had dessert, but after such a fabulous meal, the desserts were anti-climactic, for me at least. We also had coffee; it was French press, prepared at the table, but only so so. I admit I'm totally spoiled for after dinner coffee or cappuccinos by the fact that I use Peet's beans to prepare my coffee at home and also by having a decent cappuccino maker of my own. This tiny restaurant is a bit off the beaten path, in an incredibly unassuming building, but the food is superb and well worth the trip. York Street definitely makes my small list of best places to eat in Dallas.