Elements Cafe - Haddon Heights, NJ
Elements Café
517 Station Avenue
Haddon Heights, NJ
Menu: Website Menu
856-546-8840
On a quaint little street in an adorable little town sits the unassuming but charming Elements Café. Simple is probably the best way to describe Elements – two simple rows of square tables, each with a plain white table cloth and black napkins. There is a simple tea light inside a vase decorating each table, and a simple set of salt and pepper shakers. When you taste the food at Elements Café, you will understand why they need to keep the décor of the restaurant simple. The flavors are complex, varied and delicious, and you don’t need the distraction of an overly decorated restaurant while you enjoy your meal!
Elements Café is a tapas style restaurant. This happens to be my favorite way to eat a meal, especially with a table full of family and friends. Tapas, originating in Spain, is really appetizer sized portions of things. The word “tapa” in Spanish means lid or cover. Using the words tapas to describe this way of eating probably comes from a time when people would have to cover their drinks with their hands to keep bugs from dropping into their drinks. Restaurants and bars eventually served the drinks with a piece of flatbread on top so patrons didn’t have to keep their hands on top of the drinks through their meal, and the flatbread evolved so that it eventually became something for patrons to snack on.
We arrived at the restaurant at 8:30 on a Thursday evening, and immediately thought they must already be closed, as there was no one in the restaurant. Jim went in ahead of me to check, and was warmly greeted by the hostess/waitress on duty. She told him they were seating for another 15 minutes, and invited us to choose whichever table we wanted. We selected one midway between the kitchen and the door, so we still had a bit of a view of the outside street through the front window of the restaurant (the only window in the restaurant), but this poor girl who was probably hoping to leave for the night shortly didn’t have as far to walk as if we had taken a table right up in the window. I have to make my first comment here on the service. Our waitress NEVER made us feel like she was ready to go home and we ruined her plans for an early evening. She was friendly, attentive, and extremely helpful in offering her opinions when we asked for her recommendations. She brought ice water to the table immediately, and told us to take our time browsing the menu. She was an absolute delight the entire evening.
The menu is broken down into courses – from first to Main. You get fresh bread with your meal, which was a terrible waste on us, except when Jim used his to sop up some soup remnants. For an additional $2.50 per person, you can choose tomato bruschetta, hummus, or marinated olives to go with your bread. We stuck with the butter, since I wasn’t eating any of the bread and Jim, well, he only needed his bread for clean up duty. We started with two selections from the first course section. On this particular night, we chose the pulled pork potstickers ($7), which were highly recommended by the guy in the jewelry store near the restaurant when we were there last week getting a watch fixed. Three generously sized potstickers arrived resting in a sweet and tasty barbecue sauce. The outside of the potstickers was pan fried and just had a nice crisp to them, and the insides were stuffed full of tender pulled pork. Our other choice was a sweet potato and asiago cheese ravioli ($7). Three ravioli arrived on top of a delicate white sauce that was flavorful and perfectly seasoned. I expected the ravioli to be a bit on the heavy side, and was thrilled to bite into a light, tasty, filling, where the sweet potato was the perfect compliment to the cheese, neither overpowering the other. They were delicious!
I love soup, and for me, the second course could be nothing but the trio of soups sampler ($7). The waitress informed us that they were out of the chicken soup for the evening, but they did have two other freshly made soups – a creamy mushroom soup and a broccoli soup – that would be added to the seafood bisque to make up the trio. Served in cups about the size of espresso cups, three piping hot soup options were brought out to us. I am not a fan of broccoli soup in any manner, but for the benefit of the review, I did take a taste before passing the cup to Jim. This was a much lighter version of cream of broccoli soup. There was still that broccoli taste, but it wasn’t a heavy soup with an overpowering broccoli smell or taste. Jim loved it, and had no trouble finishing what I left. The other soups, the mushroom and the seafood bisque, were oh my goodness good! The mushroom soup was a cream style soup also, but the soups here are so light, not thick and pasty like some cream soups. It was at least as good as my favorite cream of mushroom soup from Hugo’s Restaurant in Kennett Square, PA, and I could have easily eaten a bucket full. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, I tried the seafood bisque. Again, another light and creamy soup, where the flavor speaks for itself – there isn’t a lot of spice trying to cover up the true flavors of the seafood and the cream. This was a great soup, and between the mushroom and seafood soups, Jim’s bread was working overtime to sop up every last drop.
The third course is the salad course, and there are around 5 different salad selections. We opted to skip the salad course on this particular evening, but salads are in the $5 - $6 range, and include offerings like the hearts of romaine salad with a Caesar dressing; a baby spinach salad; and a beet salad. For our main course, we chose the pan seared scallops ($11), since I’m on a scallop kick lately; as well as the stuffed lamb ($11). The scallops, three very large sea scallops, were seared to absolute flawlessness, topped with a warm salad that contained cabbage, and dressed with orange vinaigrette. The sauce was sweet and citrusy and added a really nice flavor to the scallops. The stuffed lamb dish was four good sized slices of lamb, cooked to the requested medium, and a bed of delicious baby spinach topped with a buttery sauce. The lamb was good, but we could have easily eaten a plate full of just the greens. They were the star on that plate.
By this time, I was getting full, so we opted to skip dessert. The choices on the dessert menu were tempting, though, and included traditional favorites like a warm bread pudding, as well as some unique offerings like the balsamic swirl ice cream.
Pros:
- Great food
- Outstanding soups
- Incredibly nice waitstaff
Cons:
- We found none, but if you are going here expecting diner sized portions and to walk out with doggie bags full of left overs, sorry, ain’t happenin’.
Our total for the evening was $45.50 before tax and tip, and before we added a takeout dish of short rib pierogies in a horseradish sauce to bring home to the kids. They loved it!
Anna’s Score: 3.5 Chews
Subjective rating: Good on its way to great.
Have you been to Elements Cafe? If so, please add your rating! (Limited to 1 Vote per IP Address.)
Your Score:
(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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Comments
Anna The only reason I didn’t go higher was because of the lamb. It was good, but not great, and it had great potential. The stuffing, which I didn’t review well, wasn’t really identifiable LOL! The best thing on the plate was the greens - we could have skipped the lamb altogether. And really, anyone who serves broccoli soup without being under threat of gun violence is just wrong - that might have been a con 
$11 scallops? That’s a pretty good price for three large ones. After reading the review, I was surprised you gave it a 3.5, especially with no cons. I think Autumn and I will come here, sounds like a neat place. =)