Sometimes you just want a nice, quiet meal in a neighborhood restaurant where everyone knows your name. Date Night gets off the beaten path in Roswell for another good meal. We have hit many of the places on the Roswell main drag, but tonight we find ourselves in a shopping center behind the Krispy Kreme.

The Oak Street Cafe is located on…wait for it…Oak Street. Everyone here seems to know the owner, and each other. If we lived in the neighborhood, they would probably know us too.

We read about Oak St. in the AJC, so we decided to check it out. After a nice greeting, we are brought some bread, that’s not just warm, it’s toasted.

And speaking of toasted, as the weather gets colder, we start going for those dark, rich stouts, which feature toasted barleys.

My Duck Rabbit milk stout is a smooth one, without the hoppy finish that some stouts are sporting these days. Eve’s Brooklyn lager is much lighter. It’s the kind of beer you could drink every day, with every meal. Oak Street has no taps, so the beer you get will be out of the bottle.

We are hungry tonight (actually, we are hungry every night), and plunge in with a hummus appetizer.

Most hummus is made with chick peas, but this one is made with white beans and is topped with feta cheese and some grilled onions. Check out those pita triangles. They have a good toaster here, and whatever they did to them, they are slightly crispy on the outside and warm and soft on the inside. This was a good appetizer, and it went well with our beer selections.

Next up, the main course. We are splitting an entree tonight so that we will have room for dessert. We order the polpettone because it’s said to come from the chef’s grandmother’s family recipe.

So what’s polpettone? Why, Italian meatloaf, of course, with a side of mashed potatoes. It tastes like a giant meatball. Grandma has a good recipe. You can also get it with pasta instead of the potatoes, and had we known it would be so Italian, we probably would have done that. We order another side with it…

Yes, it’s another order of Brussels sprouts. We can’t get enough of them, and they are in season. We are even making them at home.

One more decision awaits us–what to get for dessert. Our choice is between a molten chocolate cake, which takes 18 minutes to cook, or the chocolate bread pudding. Being a sucker for bread pudding, and since people were waiting for our table, we are courteous and decide to put off the molten cake for another visit.

It comes with a big hunk of ice cream. Like the chocolate bread pudding at Bone Lick BBQ a few weeks ago, it could have used some bourbon sauce, but the inside was hot and steamy. Combined with the ice cream, it gave us a nice finish to the meal.

The chef’s aunt was our waitress. Things run in the family at the Oak Street Cafe, and we are sure that if visited more often, they would “adopt” us into their family of regulars. The next time you are in Roswell, stop in and see if they reveal any more of their family “secrets”.