News-Letter

Media Credit: Yu Feng Guo Sit outside at Sascha's before the weather gets too chilly.

Many of us think that in a city like Baltimore, we can't experience fine dining without paying a high price. Literally. But I was certainly proven wrong when I entered Sascha's 527 Café.
Located around the corner from the Mount Vernon stop on the JHMI shuttle, Sascha's is accessible to Hopkins students and offers reasonable prices with a wide selection of foods.
As my friend and I stepped through the entranceway, we were greeted by a romantic contrast of new and traditional décor. Sleek track lighting and a large, heavy chandelier hung from a high ceiling supported by thick Doric columns. Impressionist art hung from the walls, each illuminated by its own set of lights, giving the appearance that the paintings were glowing.
The tablesetting for two included a candle and a single rose, evoking memories from Beauty and Beast. My friend and I were given a tall glass with bread sticks and a small bowl of olives and various pickled vegetables to munch on while we ordered from the simple but well-composed menu consisting of everything from fries in a cone to filet mignon.
Sascha's menu offered taste plates instead of appetizers to allow for a greater variety of foods. The entrées were out of this world, and the detailed descriptions alone meant I spent a very long time deciding on what to order. Those "fries in a cone," priced at only $5, aspired to something greater as they were served with Old Bay creme fraiche and Moroccan barbeque sauce. The succulent descriptions didn't stop there. Even something as simple as an entree pizza ($12) was described as "crispy pizza topped with bleu cheese and pear with a garlic infused oil.'' I want to meet whoever wrote those menus.
We finally decided on a cheese plate ($11), hyashi ($5) and pan-seared diver scallops ($10). The cheese plate consisted of three cheeses: cantal, an aged semi-hard cheese from France, Murcia, or Spanish drunken goat cheese and gemlemini gorgonzola, a soft bleu from Italy. The hyashi was a marinated seaweed salad on a bed of daikon with asparagus tips and wasabi aioli. Finally, the scallops were served atop a cucumber and mango salad in a lemongrass sauce with wasabi scented masago (flying fish roe).
The cheese plate came with crackers, grapes, strawberries and tart apples. Aside from the quality of the cheeses, the presentation was of five-star quality. Though a quality presentation tends to sacrifice quantity, we found ourselves left with more crackers and fruit than we would have liked.

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