Starting into the third week of 25 for $25, I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself. I was trying to average out at one restaurant a week, and have so far been to the Barking Frog out in Woodinville for dinner, and Ray’s Boathouse (the Cafe part) for a $12.50 lunch.

There’s really no comparison between the two restaurants as they are both very different. The similarities between the two? Both were packed to the gills when we went (Barking Frog on a Thursday night, and Ray’s on Sunday). I was very glad to have made reservations at both places. We usually try and wing it because we don’t like to have to plan to have a meal at a specific place and an exact time — and usually we manage to find odd times to eat or eat at places that always seem to have a table available for us. Also, the wait staff at both restaurants were gracious and ready to please — obviously prepared for an influx of curious first-timers.

At the Barking Frog dinner, service was impeccable (I think we had at least three different sorts of waitstaff). Diners on either side of us were celebrating birthdays, and desserts were coming out with lit candles on the side (you try walking with a lit birthday candle some time, and see how hard it is.). However, the space was too noisy and seemed to have been specifically built in order to have sound bounce off the walls and onto our poor ears.

At the Ray’s Cafe lunch, service was a little bit more casual. Our server seemed overloaded, but still found the time to come over a couple of times and make sure everything was to our satisfaction. It was a little noisy there, but not so much more than typical for a completely full restaurant. And of course, the daytime lunch view was gorgeous, and we drank in the sight of sailboats scudding across the sunlit water.

Having been to only three restaurants so far, I have a long way to go before declaring an overall winner. One of the reasons I will say that the Yarrow Bay Grill is a long way in the lead is that it wins on three fronts: the surroundings are nice, the noise level is pleasant, and the food is the best of the three. At Ray’s I actually took a peek through the real menu because I really wasn’t impressed with the lunch menu. They change it from week to week, and I had made a decision to go based on week 1’s menu. By the time I got a look at week 2, I was already committed. The Frog’s menu was better in some ways and worse in others. The chef had decided to go boldly out there with such scary dessert combinations as a fallen chocolate souffle with roasted banana ice cream and smoked paprika caramel. I managed to get a bite of this off the husband’s plate, and the combination of flavours made my tongue scream “WHAT THE HELL?” in horror. The husband liked it though.