G o ahead. Just try to find a place to eat in Charlottesville on a Monday night. We dare you.
Local restaurants close down more often than the ITC server at the start of each week, which we disgustedly learned in our failed attempts to dine at Immigrant Soul, Moondance Cafe, Escafe, Monsoon and Tokyo Rose and thought better of daring CJ's Bomb Shelter and El Girasol. After drifting from one end of town to the other seeking first a place we would like to eat, and eventually just any place that served food, we finally landed at Tiffany's Seafood.
Tiffany's Seafood, located in University Shopping Center next to the Cavalier Washette, brings a little bit of Beach Week dining to Charlottesville. Perhaps we might have enjoyed our meal better if we had just spent a long day tanning on the beach, relaxing with friends and celebrating the end of the school year.
Instead, we had spent hours searching high and low for a restaurant - any restaurant - that was open in Charlottesville on a cold Monday night in February.
As long as the diner is not searching for a solid presentation, Tiffany's Oysters Brochette ($4.95) certainly will please.
A single skewer of select fried oysters wrapped in bacon, accompanied by a ramekin of cocktail sauce and a one-square-inch piece of stale lettuce, the brochette tastes much better than it looks. In fact, it is quite delicious.
In addition to the appetizers, Tiffany's offers several soups to start the meal. The New England clam chowder ($2.15/cup, $3.75/bowl) allegedly was homemade, but it didn't taste much different from the "heat and serve" kind sold in your local supermarket. The soup was not bad, though, a nice mix of chopped potatoes, clams and spices in a cream base.
For a main course, a variety of seafood platters fill the menu, ranging in price from $10 to $20. The jumbo fried shrimp platter ($11.95) features six breaded and fried butterfly shrimp. The special cut makes for daintier eating, and the shrimp were expertly fried.
Many places attempt to mask less-than-fresh seafood by heavily over-frying the shellfish, but Tiffany's has a way with shrimp.
The dinners come with a choice of baked potato or French fries and a garden side salad or coleslaw.
One of the nightly specials, the Alaskan snowcrab, comes sauteed in alfredo sauce and served over bowtie pasta ($12.95). This vast, unending dish is very rich, just as expected. Although the sauce is a little too heavy, the crab remains tender and well prepared, an interesting twist to your traditional alfredo.
Like many seafood restaurants designed to get a lot of seafood into you very quickly, Tiffany's offers a broad selection of seafood combo platters. You can choose three of the listed items for $13.95, or four for $17.95. The choices include snow crab legs, steamed or fried shrimp, oysters, flounder, crab cakes, clams and scallops.
Tiffany's also offers specials on different nights of the week, such as all-you-can-eat Alaskan snowcrab legs every Wednesday.
The desserts, although fairly basic, are homemade. The double fudge brownie sundae ($3.75) sounded more luscious than it tasted. It was rather lackluster, yet nicely presented in a parfait glass with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream. The brownie was below par, and certainly lacked any fresh-from-the-oven gooeyness.
Tiffany's forgets all about the finishing touches.
Like many of the main dishes, there were some easy extra flourishes that could have jazzed things up a bit but were neglected. Tossing a cherry on top of a sundae, for example, perks things up at little extra cost.
The service at Tiffany's generally was harried. Everyone was running around, the dining area was crowded and the wait staff could have been friendlier. Of course, this is all somewhat understandable because Tiffany's evidently is the only restaurant in all of Charlottesville open Monday nights.
The milieu generally is kitsch. Big plastic swordfish, nets, seashell lamps and an aquarium surround you as you eat. And even though Tiffany's may bring a bit of Beach Week to Charlottesville in the middle of winter, there unfortunately is no Spanish Galleon to go to afterward.
The closest you'll get is by sampling one of the two $4.95 tropical drinks - the Bahama Mama or the Yellow Bird - both of which seem to be pineapply Bacardi rum and banana liqueur concoctions.
Tiffany's is, on the whole, a neat addition to the Charlottesville dining palette. There is everything you would expect from a seafood dive, and we use that term affectionately. They offer a large variety of food, large portions and reasonable prices. Though the kitchen is by no means five-star, the food is fair enough.
As a rule, Tiffany's does well with all things fried. And most importantly, they're open seven days a week.
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