#3 - Ants Pants Cafe - Sam's synopsis

Nothin' beats a bottle (or two) of wine on a Saturday night

As I'm sitting here eating instant ramen for dinner, I miss our Saturday experience at Ants Pants this past weekend. I've been to Ants Pants numerous times for breakfast and always enjoyed it (except for the one time I was extremely hungover and our food took far too long to arrive), so I had high expectations for dinner.  The dinner menu does in fact have a lot of items that are served during regular breakfast/lunch hours, but there was a nice selection of dinner-only choices.

The restaurant itself was dimly lit with candles, but not so low that you couldn't read anything - it actually set an appealing ambiance (how's that for alliteration?). There were very few people there, which is probably partially due to the fact that it was 45 minutes before closing and partially because it was restaurant week and Ants Pants didn't have much to offer in that arena.  Either way, because of the lack of business that week, everyone in the restaurant got a free bowl of mussels.  I'm always afraid that I'm secretly allergic to seafood and mussels are particularly scary looking, but I took the plunge and ate a few and they were pretty delicious. I should also mention that dinner at Ants Pants is BYO, so we had two bottles of wine among the four of us (sorry, no guest bloggers this time).  

The sweet potato fries are always as good as I had hoped

our table was pretty full of food and alcohol

Besides the free appetizer, I ordered the hummus and pita to start off.  I have to say, I was pretty underwhelmed. The hummus was bland and the pita was too thin. Not something I would order again.  But I am happy to say, for their sake, that this is the only item I've ever had that I didn't like from Ants Pants. You can't win 'em all. Our table also got roasted brussel sprouts with parmesan cheese which were amazing - I don't usually like the bitterness of brussel sprouts but these were roasted to perfection and the sharpness of the cheese really brought out the flavors. And of course, we got not one, but two orders of sweet potato fries - a staple of Ants Pants in my mind.  Sweet chili dipping sauce and big flaky grains of salt on fat wedges of fried sweet potato... I don't think I have to say much more than that. For dinner, I had the pancetta BLT with avocado, tomato, arugula and garlic aioli on focaccia bread with a side of "chips" (australian for waffle-like fries). The sandwich was hearty and filling, although a little less flavorful than I had anticipated.  Still, it contained some of my favorite things (pancetta, avocado, arugula) and overall the different components blended well together. I would have liked to have heard about dessert, but we were already there past closing and I think the staff were antsy (HA) to get us out of there, so perhaps some other time. All in all, it was a great night of food and friends and I would definitely recommend trying dinner at Ants Pants (or if you go there for breakfast, get the dill scrambled eggs - my favorite brunch menu item there!)

the main course!

And with that, I will bid you adieu until next time, dear readers.  I also promise that for my next blog post I will actually learn how to properly format images instead of using the crappy insert and edit photos in blogger, because it is a real pain in the ass and is really messing with my dreams of making these blog posts more aesthetically pleasing. I haven't used HTML since the days of geocities, so we'll see how well this process goes..

Ants Pants Cafe
2212 South St.
Philadelphia, PA
215-875-8002