Red Lobster — for the seafood lover in you. Since that seafood lover is non-existent in Betsy, she was very nice to have lunch with me today at Red Lobster for our anniversary lunch (yes, our anniversary is tomorrow, but we always celebrate on the Labor Day Weekend, since work days don’t really give much time off at the beginning of the month). It helped that I had a $25 gift card — a Christmas gift, as I recall — that we hadn’t used yet.
Fortunately Red Lobster also serves a lot of chicken, and Betsy eats chicken. She had their maple glazed chicken, which came with wild rice pilaf, a side (she chose broccoli), and a side salad.
I ended up ordering the same thing I think I ordered the previous time I had gone to Red Lobster — their Bar Harbor Salad with Shrimp. I am the one of the two of us that eats salads more than Betsy does, and what makes salads so good is not just the lettuce, but everything they put on them. At home I think I am the type that puts on “too much” dressing (as if that is possible!), but I also eat more greens because of it. At Red Lobster, the Bar Harbor salad is loaded with lots of wonderful things: With fresh romaine, sun-dried berries and honey-roasted pecans with a blueberry-balsamic vinaigrette dressing. The waitress asked me if I wanted the bleu cheese crumbles — but of course!
I had looked at a soup and shrimp salad combo as my other option, so I suggested Betsy and I add a bowl of New England Clam Chowder to our order, because I did want some soup, and Betsy always enjoys a good Clam Chowder (her one seafood like).
By the time we began the meal with their cheddar biscuits and the bowl of chowder, we had enough room for about half my salad, and half her chicken, with her salad entirely untouched, so we boxed them up to take home as leftovers.
Since this seems totally non-sequential, I will end my notes with the beverage order, which was taken first. Betsy had soda — half Det Coke/half Sprite. It came out with the Sprite on the bottom and the Coke on the top, with the border between them slowly mingling and not quite defined. I asked what sort of flavored iced teas they had, and chose the cranberry iced tea. I like most things cranberry, and this tea was excellent. Most flavored teas are heavy with the sugars, almost syrupy, but the cranberry tea wasn’t sweet that way at all. It still had the tart taste that cranberry should have, without any of the mouth-puckering intensity it can sometime get. Very smooth is how I would describe it.
Our waitress, Melissa, was very attentive, helpful in suggestions, and always had what we needed when we needed. And I could see as she moved throughout the tables near us that she was just a helpful and personable to the other tables she served as she was to us.
To conclude, it was a nice $13 date — by the time we included tax, tip, and gift card.
At The Rainbow 