Restaurant Week at El Sitio

In our last article, we gave you the scoop on the various local restaurants participating in Collingswood Restaurant Week. We struggled to choose just one, but ultimately picked El Sitio.

El Sitio is a restaurant we save for special occasions. It offers a fine-dining feel at a mid-range price and with lots of romantic ambiance. Restaurant Week was a great opportunity for us to enjoy a full, three-course meal.

El Sitio is probably not the restaurant to choose if you’re in a hurry. The dishes are prepared fresh and to-order (we assume), and it can take some time for the first course to hit your table. Distract yourself with a nice bottle of wine and some good conversation.

To start, appetizers: coconut shrimp for Jessica and Argentine sausage wraps for Jamie. The shrimp were large, delicately breaded—not deep-fried—and had the loveliest toasted coconut taste.

“This is how you do coconut,” Jamie said—light, not artificial or overpowering, with a hint of spciy heat from the rocoto (chili pepper) sauce. Three of these shrimp were not enough of a portion for as good as they tasted.

In fact, they outdid grilled chorizo wrap appetizers, which were tasty in their own right. The wraps were accented by chimichurri sauce so fresh that it tasted as though the parsley had been picked right out of the ground.

El Sitio offered a small house salad as a second course. It worked well as a palate-cleanser, but the homemade honey mustard dressing was the real treat. (If it were sold at Wegman’s, we’d buy a case.)

For his entree, Jamie ordered the lobster ravioli topped with shrimp. Although it’s odd to complain about a dish tasting “too fresh,” a few bites could have been overly fishy had the creamy white wine sauce not balanced the flavors.

Jessica ordered the grilled skirt steak topped with blue cheese crumbles, mushrooms, onions, and a red wine sauce. Packed with flavor, it delivered on taste, but was a little on the smallish side, .

The Restaurant Week menu did not include dessert, but we splurged on the tres leches: vanilla sponge cake, soaked in three milks (evaporated, condensed and whole) and topped with whipped cream and caramel drizzle.

Other than the coconut shrimp, it was the highlight of the feast: light and airy without being soggy—the perfect ending to the meal.

Where did you eat for Spring Restaurant Week?