With Restaurant Week going on, there were several other restaurants that were having special deals. One of these happened to be London Grill. To thank frequent diners, they offered a special $18.95 Meal Deal of fresh maine lobster or filet of beef. This seemed like such a deal! Lobster or Filet for $18.95? Well, it didn’t quite live up to what they made it out to be.

I had gotten an email announcing the deal and it promised fresh maine lobster or filet of beef. When we got there, the little menu card now said fresh maine half lobster or filet of beef. That was fallacy number one. Well fine, we decided to go for it anyway. It mentioned nothing about how it was prepared, but we envisioned half a lobster sitting on a plate with some veggies. Well, first we got some complimentary mushrooms and bread. For someone who’s not that into mushrooms, these were surprisingly tasty! And the bread was a focaccia, also tasty. We got a house salad, which was just fine. No choice of dressing or anything, you just get what they give you. R wanted a caesar salad and they brought her out a caesar one, without any additional charge. That was pretty cool of them.

When we got the fresh maine half lobster, we actually got a bowl with whole wheat spaghetti, topped with a lobster claw, with some additional lobster meat thrown into it. Not at all what we expected. It tasted fine, but we didn’t expect a spaghetti dinner. We expected a lobster dinner. The spaghetti was also extremely garlicky and slightly spicy, which I didn’t mind, but others may. I don’t know about you, but when I envision lobster dinner, a bowl of spaghetti ain’t it.

For dessert, it was chocolate mousse. For someone who’s not all that into chocolate or mousse, I still liked this a lot. So kudos on the chocolate mousse. But no kudos for the fact that I came here to get a particular drink and they didn’t have the beer it that was required to make it. If you put a drink on the menu, then make sure you have all the components with which to make it. 99% of the reasons I even went to London Grill was to get this drink, and they didn’t even have it. Fallacy number 2.

The service… oh, the service. Our server tried, she really did, but she just wasn’t very good. She wasn’t good at explaining, she wasn’t good at imparting information, she just wasn’t very good at being a server. I suggest she look into another line of work.

At the end of the day, the meal was fine, and for getting three courses, it is a deal, but it’s not one that I could recommend. They don’t quite tell you what the deal is, and that’s how they sucker you in. They promise lobster and give you mostly lobster bits. So I’m going to have to say skip it!

M invited me over for dinner the other night, and how could I refuse. She always makes the bestest and fanciest meals! I wanted to bring her something, so I brought her some chestnuts. M had never made chestnuts before, so she quickly looked up some info online, and ended up roasting them in the oven. After scoring them, she drizzled some oil over them and then let them bake. To make sure they would get cooked all the way through, while they were cooking, we added some water to help them steam. They ended up great! While some of them were a pain in the butt to peel, they tasted delicious.

We started off with a citrus and beet salad. She also made the dressing. Who makes dressing?  Delicious, as usual.

For the main entree, we had seared scallops with a buerre blanc. The buerre blanc included shallots and fennel and white wine vinegar, so it was extremely tangy. The scallops were cooked really well, still somewhat rare on the inside, and the buerre blanc was perfect with them. We also had a side of parmesan polenta and wilted spinach. I have a weird attitude towards spinach. I love raw spinach in salads, but I’ve always disliked cooked spinach. That’s why I was so surprised to enjoy this wilted spinach. I wouldn’t necessarily want to eat this all the time, but it was good! See that, I’m still growing.

For dessert, F brought a beautiful little square layered cake. I don’t know what all the layers were, but the cake was incredibly rich and delicious. It was another great dinner with great friends. Thanks M!

I headed up to the far burbs for the first dinner party of 2010 at N’s house. There are 5 cats in that house, most are unfriendly. There’s a lot of N’s art all around the house. Naturally, as she’s an artist. What’s a dinner party without cheese and crackers? And grapes! I ate an unfairly large share of these grapes.

There was tons to eat. Bread, with butter and nutella! Little tiny crab cakes with a remoulade. A made those. Some little phyllo dough puff things filled with spinach.

Garlic broccoli, and some random flatbread type of stuff.

Rice and some dip for the flatbread!

There was even a warming tray to keep the food hot! Hello chicken marsala! Hello veggies! And hello veggie ravioli! A made the ravioli too. It was all freakin delicious. I loved all the red and white dishes too, they were adorably old school.

For dessert, a ginormous fruit tart! It wasn’t much of a tart, it ended up being pretty much just a cake with fruit on top, but it was still quite tasty. We ended up trying to play this game, Quelf, later on in the evening, but it wasn’t so easy. There were too many people and too many of them were drunk, so game playing proved quite difficult. But we’ll have to give it a shot another time. Thanks N for the lovely party!