Wednesday, February 18, 2009

A Blue Plate Valentine's Day

Last year was our first Valentine's Day together, and for some reason Zed and I felt compelled to get dressed up and go out for a "nice dinner". We ended up at the now closed Il Portico and had a fantastic (but slightly pricier) meal.

This year though, we thought we'd stick with something familiar and meaningful to the both of us and so we ended up at Blue Plate Diner. Blue Plate was our first Original Fare encounter, where we went for the last "family meal" before my parents moved to BC this past December, a comfortable meeting place after the loss of a friend last June and the location of a Site Crew family dinner about a month ago.

We arrived at 7:30PM (we had made a reservation a couple weeks before on Open Table) to a not quite full but definitely busy restaurant (I was glad to be seated slightly away from the hustle and bustle against a wall towards the back of the restaurant).

The specials intrigued me and I ended up choosing the PEI mussels in a white wine, saffron and shallot sauce, while Zed went for the steak sandwich off of the regular menu (the menus have recently been dressed up with some nice hardcover bindings... very nice). We both went for the feature wine that evening, a Sauvignon blanc from New Zealand.

The mussels lit by a red candle and red shaded lamp

Zed's steak sandwich lit by the same red light

Our mains arrived in good time and were great as usual. For dessert we settled on the very cheesily named, "Bleeding Heart" cake, a warm chocolate cake filled with strawberry coulis.

The "Bleeding Heart" Cake

After dinner we ended up stopping at Leva for a coffee on the way home. We thought they would be packed, but we had the place to ourselves. Along with our coffees, we came out of Leva with the Valentine's Chocolate Collection from Kerstin's Chocolates that included three different types of bark (a dark with cherries, a milk with nibs and a white that appeared pink because of some cinnamon candy).


All in all I think we achieved our goal of a nice, comfortable (and tasty) Valentine's Day.

1 comment:

Isabelle said...

That's funny...my husband and I were also at Leva on Valentine's Day, around 10 pm, and it was empty for us too! Sounds like you had a lovely evening.