5940 Mullen Way, Edmonton

A couple of weeks ago, I finally had the chance to go to XIX. I don’t have many occasions where I have to go to the south side of Edmonton, and what with the new St. Albert location of XIX opening up, I thought it was finally time to give it a try.

It’s located right off of Rabbit Hill Road south of Edmonton. It has an ample amount of parking. This restaurant reminds me a bit of Hardware Grill because of their interior, menu option, and price point. The kitchen has a huge window so that everything in visible, which is something I always enjoy. We came right before the dinner rush, so it wasn’t too bad. I recommend making reservations because it can get a little bit busy there!

For food, we decided on getting two appetizers and two entrees: The Spicy Miso Albacore Tuna Tartar, the double-smoked bacon-wrapped scallops, the Chimichurri rack of lamb, and the dungeness crab crusted grouper. Because we came a little bit before the dinner rush, things were going really quickly and smoothly, and we had pretty good service.

The tuna tartar is served on top of avocado, red onion, and topped with sunchoke chips and spicy miso dressing. This was definitely a winner at the table! There’s a generous amount of tuna and all of the flavours went really well together. The sunchoke chips gave the dish a nice crunch and texture. I definitely recommend getting this to start!

The other appetizer we got was the double-smoked bacon wrapped scallops. This, too was a relatively good dish. The scallop itself was cooked perfectly an was very tender. The cauliflower purée had really good flavour and went well with the single scallop. Even though this dish was good, it was so small for its price. Overall, I liked the tuna tartar much more.

The Chimchichurri rack of lamb was cooked perfectly. The lamb was incredibly tender and easy to eat. I would say that it was hands down cooked better than the rack of lamb that we had from Hardware Grill. The brioche bread pudding was really nice and went well with the vegetables and lamb. Definitely a good dish to get if you’re a lamb-lover!

Our second entrée was the Dungeness crab crusted grouper. Seems like the theme of our night was seafood, what with 3/4 of our dishes having some sort of seafood in it! I don’t usually order fish at a restaurant, but something about this appealed to me, and it definitely did not disappoint. The crab crust was nice and crunchy and gave nice texture to the dish. The grouper was maybe a tad overcooked, but everything else about this dish was great. The tarragon-honey cream really added to the dish.

Overall, I really enjoyed my experience at XIX. I would definitely come back here and try some of their other dishes. Some time in the future I could definitely see myself going to their St. Albert location, because it’d actually be faster for me to drive there than all the way to the south side. Near the end of my dinner, things did slow down quite a bit as they got busy, it took quite some time to receive our bill, but otherwise, I really enjoyed it there. Give it a try!