Well yesterday was another “fun” 12 hour work day and today I’m pretty sure it will be like a one billion hour work day. Who am I, a doctor or something? Not cool. This work week has been crazy because I’m going to Israel this Saturday and haven’t been able to spend as much time in the office lately due to a few little things called closing on a condo, moving, and most recently – my husband’s birthday. I just couldn’t leave him at home alone on his birthday while I work late, so instead we did something way more fun – we went out!

As I mentioned in my previous post, dinners at steak houses are an infrequent occurrence in this household but they are my husband’s favorite type of “fancy meal.” I guess most males would be put in this category. So for his birthday I took him out to KO Prime, a modern steakhouse. Their menu seemed creative enough that I wouldn’t feel obliged to order a steak so I felt like this was a fun way to treat my husband while still staying true to myself

The decor was pretty unique. The dining room was dark and almost space-like. I snapped a photo of the ceiling with the intention of getting more angles later, but my camera had other plans for me. It wanted to be recharged! What? That is not good timing!!! I hoped it would last at least for a few more shots of at least my entree and thankfully it cooperated. I literally had 1 second to snap a photo before it would shut off. Anyways, back to our meal…

Dining room ceiling:

The hubs reviewing the wine list:

Really cool salt and pepper shakers + my first glass of Cotes de Rhone (I probably had a little less than 1/2 bottle throughout dinner… Adam and the waiter kept refilling my glass so it was hard to keep track).

This is where you normally would see a picture of the bread basket. It was rustic bread (sour dough, rye); some slices reminded me a lot of the Russian black bread so I liked it a lot because it reminded me of a childhood classic. Adam was not impressed. Sorry for the lack of photo, I tried to conserve the camera’s battery for the money shots While nibbling on the bread we made our menu choices. I really wanted to keep the dinner on the lighter side, so I started with a salad. This was not just any salad, though. This guy had watermelon!

Arugula and watermelon, la quercia ham, passion fruit, and fiddlehead tomme salad

This was a very generous portion! And what you can’t see well is that the salad is sitting on huge chunks of watermelon, which is really the most unique salad ingredient I’ve ever seen. I love strawberries, blueberries, and peaches in salads, and this proved to me that really, you can put any fruit in a savory salad and it will work! The watermelon juice exploded in my mouth with every bite, and its sweetness was perfectly contrasted by the saltiness of the prosciutto and the aged cheese (I know they call it something fancy but that’s what it really was). The dressing was quite nice too – very light, perfectly coating the arugula without overpowering the rest of the salad ingredients. I really enjoyed this unique salad combo!

For my entree, I broke my own rule of always ordering the restaurant’s specialty (in this case clearly this being a steakhouse, I should have ordered a steak) and went with fish. For fish they had 2 choices: salmon and striped bass, and the waiter highly recommended the salmon. Salmon it was!

King salmon with miso, edamame and spicy onions:

I ordered this entree without the spicy onions (first making sure that this wasn’t an essential ingredient in this dish!) and I have to say it was probably a shame… at least that was my first reaction after my initial taste. I can’t stand onions, so I don’t regret omitting them, I just don’t like ordering dishes that have onions as an integral part of them. I think spicy onions were probably the unique twist to an otherwise just solid salmon (they do sound different). With that said, actually after a few bites this really grew on me. At first I enjoyed the glaze over the salmon (and thought it was perfectly cooked) but I couldn’t really taste the flavor of the sauce. It seemed to be too mild to stand up to the strong salmon and edamame flavors. But after actually tasting the sauce by itself, I realized it was a nice citrus reduction (hmm, now that I’m looking at the name of this dish, perhaps it was a miso reduction well, it tasted citrusy to me!). This really turned this around for me, and all of a sudden it all worked! I also had a few forkfulls of Adam’s side dish – the short rib mac & cheese.

Now that was decadent! What’s funny was that I thought it tasted more like cheesy pasta than a “mac & cheese” but of course that’s what mac & cheese is, a pasta with cheese! I guess I was expecting little elbow shaped pasta with a nice crust baked over it. Don’t get me wrong, this was quite incredible, just not traditional mac & cheese (I guess that’s what they were going for!).

I ate 1/2 of my entree (taking the rest home) to save room for dessert. We all know here I can’t review a restaurant without trying their dessert Adam and I split the dark chocolate “s’mores.” This was a fun play on the traditional s’mores… a graham cracker crust, chocolate mousse, and of course mini marshmallows. This was perfectly complemented by the cool cherry sorbet. Oh yeah, this was gooood!

This picture looks a little puney, but his was actually a very generous portion. I usually don’t like sharing my dessert but given that it was my second one for the day, I agreed to share it with the birthday boy, and I was glad I did. If I ate the whole thing, it would definitely put me over the edge and would make for an unpleasant rest of the evening.  This was a dessert that made a great last impression of this meal. I’d come back here just for it! (hmm, I think I’ve said that before… what can I say, I love dessert! )

We had a great time and I would definitely recommend KO Prime (although both Adam and I still think that Mooo, where I took him last year, is the best steak house and definitely one of the best restaurants in Boston). The bar looked pretty cool too, so we may swing by there one day just for a fun cocktail on a random night.

What’s your favorite type of restaurant?