You know the small-plates trend has reached some sort of conclusion when it arrives at your neighborhood Houlihan’s. The chain is beta-testing a truly extensive new small-plates menu at select restaurants – including the Brentwood location.
Highlights include grilled naked Chinese dumpling kabobs, smoked pork flatbread pizza with cilantro-peanut pesto, Truckstop Fries in chipotle cheese sauce, goat cheese and artichoke poppers, a “pot roast slider” with fried onion straws, and (gulp) more than three dozen other choices, some as inexpensive as $2 to $3.
The dizzying array of new dishes on the small-plates menu comes under an encouraging note: “Your server can guide you through this funhouse.”
– Byron Kerman
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2010.