Mark’s Score 9.2
If you are wandering around downtown Easton looking for a good place to eat, you could easily miss Tiger Lilly. It is a few blocks outside of the cluster of restaurants and shops between the court house and the Tidewater Inn. If you are parked in a parking lot in the center of town you have to walk a bit further to get to Tiger Lilly.
Austin Smale (GM) and Tyler Heim (executive chef) opened Tiger Lilly in October of 2021. Smale previously worked at Limoncello in St Michaels and Heim was a chef at Bas Rouge. With a pedigree like that, one should expect much from Tiger Lilly. At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of the restaurant. They present themselves as a fusion restaurant, fusing foods and flavors from Asia and Latin America, with a casual tiki bar vibe. Heim defines the atmosphere as sophistication without pretension. Fusion restaurants can go horribly wrong, being neither here nor there. The trick is to make the fusion uniquely your own.
I was in Easton on a hot summer’s day. They have a streetside patio, which I usually prefer but this day was just a bit too hot, so I decided to sit at the bar. The entrance has a vague industrial vibe, with the bar is immediately to the right as you enter. On this day there was no one else at the bar, including the bar tender. I hesitated, wondering if the bar was closed, but a very friendly and helpful employee invited me to sit down, informing me the bartender would be back shortly.
The helpful employee turned out to be Austin Smale, who happened to be sitting down to lunch at the bar himself. The menu has a more Latin feel than Asian. Austin called it Latin with an Asian twist. I had a hard time deciding what to eat, so I went for something I had never tried before, a Peruvian-style steak saltado. Austin claimed it was his “go to” dish at Tiger Lilly. There is a large Japanese community in Peru and a saltado is basically an Asian stir-fry with Peruvian flavors. The saltado is served with jasmine rice and the house salad. Since they call themselves a tiki bar, having once lived in Kona, I also a glass of the Kona Ale, a very tiki sort of beer.
Never having had a soltado before, I am perhaps not the best judge of a good soltado. But I have had stir-fry, the steak was tender, the vegetables crip, there was a nice balance between the two, and the sauce was savory, tangy, with just enough to coat the food. In short, all the qualities you expect in stir-fry. As for the accompanying house salad, whoever buys their balsamic vinegar sure knows what they are doing.
I stated earlier that a fusion restaurant must make the food and atmosphere their own, and Tiger Lilly pulls it off with style. If you are in Easton, it is well worth the extra block walk.
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