Danielle Blog

Valentine’s Day Supper at Zelo

Well, I’d been thinking about posting a recap of our Valentine’s Day dinner at Zelo and then I ended up sick this week.  Not sick enough to miss work, but sick enough that my enthusiasm for pretty much everything was decreased.  Jenski asked about supper too.  So, now that I’m feeling less runny-nose-y and tired, I’ll give you the menu and my impressions.

Overall, it was the best meal I’ve had out probably since our Anniversary supper last July.  So, we were due for a good meal.  And I think this one beats that one hands down.   Thus, I’m hard pressed to come up with a meal that was this good.

Since we’ve been to this restaurant before, I remembered a little bit about the decor.   But I’d forgotten how beautiful it is inside.  When we walked in, I was struck by the colors and architecture, and the lights which were these wire shapes of different sizes (at least 4 feet long) that had other colored cubes and spheres inside them that had lights inside.  They were really cool and unique. (you should click on the link to just see the photos of the decor which come up and rotate right away)

The menu quickly caught my attention, because they had lump crab cakes for an appetizer.  Which we ordered right away along with a lemonade for me and a martini for HB.

It is funny to mention a drink, but since I don’t drink caffeinated beverages anymore, I usually really don’t like my beverage with supper very much.  Now, there are places with good non-caffeinated drinks, but they are more rare than the wealth of ho-hum ones.  This place had awesome fresh squeezed lemonade.

They served us warm bread with excellent soft butter, and then the crab cakes came out.  OMG, they were so good.  I really love crab.  And these were lump crab cakes with no filler and very little material to even connect the crab pieces together.  They were just incredible.  I fell  in love with crab when we lived in Baltimore, MD which is known for crab.

I ordered a salad with goat cheese and balsamic vinegrette.  The goat cheese was soft and just sharp enough to complement the dressing beautifully.  The greens were mixed organic baby greens and just delicious.

For my entree, I had sea bass (medium well) on a bed of farro mixed with cooked spinach.  It was surrounded by a spicy tomato cream sauce that also had pieces of lump crab in it.  This time, the crab wasn’t as good as the crab cakes, because the sauce diluted the flavor of the crab.  But the sea bass, oh, it was wonderful!  It had some spices on it that I couldn’t really place, but were definitely more middle-eastern than anything else.  It was cooked perfectly and one of the best pieces of sea basses I’ve ever had.  The farro is a grain, kind of like a barley.  Mixing it with the spinach gave it a really great flavor.

I was getting relatively full at this point, but I really wanted dessert, because I remembered how good the molten chocolate cake was….

… so of course, I ordered it.  To choose a tea, they brought out this tea chest that had a really clever design.  It held large test tubes of tea (probably would hold 50-75 ml) so that you could admire the color and composition of the tea.  I chose their special blend that had green tea, peppermint (an interesting combo and not one I’ve had before), and some other flavors – I don’t remember at this point.  Of course, green tea has very low levels of caffeine in it, but I decided it would be fine to drink it.  And it was.   Just like before, they brought it out in a little iron tea pot on an iron trivet.

And then the cake came out and it all came back to me.  It was definitely the best version of molten chocolate cake that I’ve ever had anywhere.  And believe me, I’ve tried a lot.  If a restaurant has it, and I’m ordering dessert, I always get it.  Even cheesecake doesn’t beat it out.  Although, speaking of cheesecake, I think I’ll make one for our B-days this year.  HB’s and my birthdays are separated by one week, so we usually have 1 week of dessert between them.  I haven’t made our chocolate chip cheesecake recipe in quite a while.

Like I said up front, the meal as a whole was just incredible.  I think it might become one of the main restaurants we go to for special occasions.  And just think, our b-days are right around the corner!  (March 12th for me, March 5th for HB)

And that also means a Wii is right around the corner! 

It was a great way to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the music.  This restaurant plays the one of the best mixes of music.  Zelo and Outback probably play the most of the songs that we like.  We heard the Beatles, Sarah McLachlan, Eric Clapton, and others that I can’t remember now that it was a week ago.

And HB and I listened to some Hip Hop on the way to and then  variety of music on the way home from the restaurant.  The Rihanna, the Shakira song – the one about the hips – Beyonce, Britney (yes, a new Britney song), Red Hot Chili Peppers, Greenday and I can’t remember the others again.  It was a lot of fun!