Park Grille, spring menu

Tonight's meal at our favorite restaurant:
I was ecstatic to see that the menu changed for spring, one of the only hopeful signs of a warmer season ahead with this week's freakish dose of snow and freezing rain. (Funny, even the view was season-ambiguous. The area outside looked very much in transition from ice rink to beer garden, but uncertain about the beer garden.)
Eaten:
Chicago ciopinno- J got, not wild about. Prawns had a little too much facial expression and there was an underpinning of fennel that wasn't sitting right.
Garlic and potato soup- me. Also a little funny, "dark tasting," but don't know why. My don't-ask-don't-tell policy about stocks may be to blame.
White asparagus salad with watercress, toasted wafer of cheese and a poached egg in a lemon vinaigrette.: awesome. Their salads have always done right by me, and this one put me on to lemon and eggs as a savory combination which I hadn't considered before. The California Riesling I had with it was OK, but there's something too in-your-face about California wines to me lately.. the winery was Boon Docks, Boon Doggle, somethingorother. Had a muscat by them with dessert which was beefier than I expected too.
So dessertS (yes, there were two of them) were a chocolate stout cake with espresso ice cream with a sprinkle of oats to evoke the stout... formidable to be sure. But the other, the strawberry Napoleon, was hands down the best sweet thing we'd ever eaten there: roasted strawberries layered with a goat-cheese-like creme fraiche and crispy thin phyllo rounds drizzled with balsamic vinegar.
It's unusual that anything on the menu leave us cold, as the soups did, but it'll always be a favorite haunt with the seasonally changing menu, excellent service and dessert into the stratosphere.