A Menu Of Exotic Dishes To Impress Your Date
We like to say that Italian is the no-fail date cuisine, whether you're dining out or eating at home. But sometimes no-fail isn't exactly what we want; we want excitement, for things to be put on the line. That's when slightly more exotic cuisines come into play.
Mussels may not be everyone's first choice for a date, but we think they're fun to eat with your hands and get a little messy. Teach your date to abandon his fork and use an empty mussel shell to pluck the meat out of the mussels in his bowl. You can serve the Thai salad as a first course, or go at the salad and mussels side by side, sharing. Coconut pudding is a sweet, simple, make-ahead finale for the date.
Spicy Thai Beef Salad with Mizuna
Want wine with your dinner? Caroline Helper is here to guide you through what is best.
The ingredient list for each dish gave me the following list of flavors: grassy, fresh, spicy, herby, and fruity. Although there is beef in the first course, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest a couple of white wines. I can hear the resounding gasps of horror. White wine with beef? Sacrilege! Not quite. Though beef is traditionally paired with red wines, this is nowhere written as a rule. There are white wines out there that have assertive flavors and high acid that interact pleasantly with beef.
To emphasize the more pronounced flavors of each dish here, I think that a Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand would be marvelous — known for its herbaceous and even vaguely grassy quality, it's also got plenty of fruit and a high acidity that would make that beef salad really sing.
Try:
Whitehaven Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc
Kim Crawford Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc
Mud House Marlborough White Swan Reserve
Cloudy Bay Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc