Lunch on Tuesday: food pictures - the last hurrah

So I started reading about the 4-Hour Body diet yesterday morning.  I had plans to meet a friend for lunch that afternoon, at our favorite upscale lunch spot.  I hadn't actually committed to starting the diet at that point, but I was thinking about it.  So I started taking photos of what I ate. 

Restaurant Eve is in Old Town Alexandria, and it's a great place to eat.  It is totally overpriced, though, and is definitely the kind of place you'd go for dinner as a special occasion.  But they have this great lunch deal, called the "lickety split" menu.  It's served in the bar area, and you get to choose two things from the menu for $13.50 - any two things - wine and dessert, soup and a salad, etc.  And the food is really, really good.

So here is what I ate:

The soup of the day was lobster bisque, which really wasn't thick and creamy like you'd expect.  It was flavorful and brothy, and those croutons on top?  They're tiny little puff-pastry circles - off the charts on this carbslut's scale!  It was delicious.

One thing I love about the 4-Hour Body Diet is that you get to drink up to two glasses of wine (preferably red) every day during the week!  That's more than I drink - I usually have a glass of red wine with dinner several times a week.  I love the food/wine combo, and there are some dishes that just aren't as good without a glass of wine. 

The bread?  Well, it was pre-diet commitment.  And wow, was it good.  Warm and softly dense on the inside, chewably crusty on the outside.  Mmmmm.  I ate one and a half pieces, as shown.  I could have eaten the whole loaf.  It has just occurred to me that if I came to this restaurant on a splurge Saturday, I wouldn't be able to afford to eat whatever and as much as I wanted!

My friend and I couldn't decide between the ahi rolls and the salad of the day, which was some kind of fish, can't remember exactly what (I love them all, so I'm not picky.  Snapper, maybe) and salad greens with strips of beets in a delicious vinaigrette dressing.  So we ordered both and split them.  (There were 9 little ahi rolls - notice that we cut one in half.  Fair's fair, after all!)  We didn't have dessert.  But we wanted it.

Not bad for a last hurrah, eh?  But really, it wouldn't have been that hard to follow the diet and still eat here - the fish and salad part would have been allowed.  The wine, too.  The bread, nope.  But I could have picked something else and still it would have worked.  I just wish I were more fond of protein and less a total and complete carb slut.