A Tale of Two Scallops

Dining out on Friday and Saturday, I had scallops both nights, and it’s hard for me to decide whose scallops were better, that’s how good they were.

Friday’s were Glenn’s, big, big sea scallops in a subtly-baconned sauce. Truth to tell, I’m remembering bacon from the blackboard more than from my own taste memory, since there wasn’t anything overtly baconny about the flavor. And that’s a good thing. I love bacon as much as the next guy, but if the bacon had detracted or distracted from the true flavor of the scallops, that would have been a bad thing. Not only were the scallops big and perfectly cooked, there were a lot of them; looking at the plate, I knew from my first bite that I was going to be scallop-sated by the end of the meal, no discomforting sense of scarcity there. I might almost say that they were the best scallops I’ve ever had, except that they were tied with the scallops I had the very next night.

Those were from the Bank Lane Bistro in Lake Forest. “Wood-oven seared panko crusted.” (I’m grabbing that from the online menu. I wouldn’t be able to supply one of those words, not one, without it.) These were smaller than those at Glenn’s, and fewer—and yet, because of the intensity of the flavor and the perfection of the cooking (and the cleverly filling side dish of “forbidden black rice”) I experienced no sense of scarcity there, either. (There was a nice, tiny, unbilled lagniappe of sweet crab meat on the side, too.) Each bite was an ascent into scallop heaven.