This week is Downtown Restaurant Week in St. Louis. This is pretty cool, a bunch of restaurants are offering three course menus for only $25. Since Kim brought this to our attention we thought she should do the honors of choosing the restaurant: Kitchen K. Here was the whole menu but I’ll be focusing on what I ordered with brief mentions of what Kim, Kate and Bob ordered.
Appetizer: Tempura Battered Coconut Shrimp. I was a little disappointed with this dish and here’s why. When we walked up to the restaurant, we saw this woman with this plate of three large pieces of shrimp, entirely coated with batter like this:
(Thank you, stickygooeychef for the photo.)
It looked wonderful. What I got instead was three tiny shrimp laying on a plate with barely any batter on it. So not what the woman had outside. It was as if the chef got too lazy or ran out of the good shrimp. I tasted Bob’s Lobster Bisque. It was adequate, a little bland. I would agree with Bob in that Trailhead does have a much better bisque.
Entree: Wild Alaskan Salmon Piccata. If you like piccata, then you would be wise to choose this dish. The salmon and green beans were cooked well. The mashed potatoes were your normal mashed potatoes (they tasted even better when you swirl them in the lemon butter sauce). It was a good dish, nothing fancy at all. Bob and Kate ordered the scallops and they were excellent, especially the wasabi mashed potatoes. The wasabi was not overwhelming at all, you only get a whiff of it at the end of your bite.
Dessert: Peanut Butter Pie. Delicious dessert, a perfect balance of chocolate and peanut butter. I would say all the desserts were delicious. Bob, of course, got the carrot cake, and Kim got the chocolate ecstasy. I always worry about flourless cakes because I’ve had ones that were on the dry side but this one had more of a dense cheesecake consistency and it lived up to its name.
This is a perfect opportunity for you to try a new restaurant at reasonable price and I would suggest that you guys, if you can, take advantage of this. Kitchen K is a solid restaurant, it doesn’t wow you with new and interesting flavors and you won’t walk out going “This is the best food I’ve ever had” but you do leave satisfied. I do have to warn you, though, the service is little to be desired. We had people sit down after us and served before we were and we also had to wait longer than needed to pay our bill. But maybe our waitress had an off night, who knows.