Our hometown chefs are doing us proud during Restaurant Week, rolling out some creative menus that capitalize on the best the season has to offer. We’ll have a hard  time choosing between these two — so we may have to eat at both!

6a00d83451b91969e20120a956917a970b-200wiAt The Daily Planet in downtown Burlington, the hearty $25 dinner menu kicks off with a warm baby leek salad with candied pecans and Boucher Farms Gore-Dawn-Zola or braised short rib arancini with pomodoro sauce. For round two, we’ll tuck into some lamb shank sliders with kimchee, charred ramp aioli and malt vinegar chips, or perhaps a potato-crusted tofu chop with rainbow chard and whole-grain-mustard créme. And sure, we’ll take a rhubarb-mascarpone parfait to finish! If we have any room left.

From the $25 dinner menu The Wooden Spoon Bistro, we’ll start with steamed mussels with chorizo, white wine, basil, and garlic — or cornmeal-dusted oysters — then move on to hearty plates of grilled rainbow trout with vegetables, purple-potato gnocchi in white-wine butter, or braised Vermont short ribs in a maple-rhubarb reduction. Yum!

To see the menu at the Daily Planet, click here.

To check out TheWooden Spoon Bistro, click here. 

This article appears in Apr 18-24, 2012.

Corin Hirsch was a Seven Days food writer 2011 through 2016. She was also a dining critic and drinks columnist at Newsday from 2017 to 2022, and contributes to The Guardian, Wine Enthusiast and other publications. She’s spoken often on colonial era drinking and is the author of Forgotten Drinks of Colonial New England, published by History Press in 2014.