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When a South Beach resident wants just a nice light bite in a stylish setting, there are roughly a zillion places to go; it’s probably harder to find a single South Beach block where one can not get a designer salad — or crêpes, or panini, or whatever meat/fish/veggie carpaccio one fancies — than vice versa. In Aventura’s residential concrete canyons, the pickings are slimmer for anyone hoping for hipness.
At Q, which rather ambitiously advertises “international cuisine,” diners can eat either in the small but mod-minimalist indoor room or outside at one of half a dozen tables on a sidewalk bordering the mammoth parking lot at the Shoppes at the Waterways mall. One might initially imagine that inside would be a better bet, but, in terms of appetite-killing odors, eau de car exhaust has nothing on whatever Q’s cleaners use as a disinfectant; I’m sure germs don’t stand a chance against this powerful force, and neither do food smells. Grab an outdoor table.
There are few surprises on Q’s menu, and the few surprising elements we noticed did not necessarily show up on our plates. Case in point: The greens part of the Q Signature Salad, a balsamic-dressed affair featuring roasted red peppers, olives, and goat cheese-stuffed phyllo triangles, was supposed to be frisée, but turned out to be the same old mesclun mix every joint aiming at a post-iceberg lettuce clientele serves.
Everything else in the $8 salad was as promised — assuming, that is, that we all agree it is too much to expect balsamic vinaigrette to be made with authentic balsamico, rather than cheap knockoff vinegar bearing no resemblance to the aged, port wine-complex real stuff (beyond manufacture in the same Italian town, Modena) — but boring, especially the phyllo triangles. My cardiologist would no doubt have approved of the barely filled, butterless packets. I’ve chewed on notebook paper that was less spartan.
Yellowfin tuna carpaccio on watercress sounded more interesting than beef carpaccio, due to a house Asian dressing. But unfortunately the dressing tasted like little more than straight soy sauce — and not the low-sodium sort. The fish slices, so thin they had to be scraped off the plate in shreds, were totally overwhelmed with saltiness.
Crêpes make up most of the menu, over a dozen savory types and almost as many sweet sorts. We tried one of each, curious about whether, as in Brittany, the whole texture rather than just the fillings differed; traditionally delicate dessert crêpes are made from fine pastry flour, whereas savory crêpes are made from hefty whole-grain buckwheat flour to stand up to their more formidable fillings. At Q the difference seemed mainly to be that the sweet crêpes contained considerable sugar. Our mozzarella/portobello mushroom/sautéed spinach crêpe came thoroughly sogged through by the puddle of watery juices released by the vegetables. Our sweet choice, Brie with walnuts and grapes, was much more successful. The mild cheese tasted like Danish rather than French Brie, but this blandness actually worked better with the crêpe’s sweetness than a more pungent Brie would have.
Bottom line: Though not any more cutting edge than a South Beach café, Q is a cute place for a nosh. And in Aventura, any place that features a happy hour rather than an early bird is, judging by the enthused young (under 80) locals at the next table, pretty hot stuff.
