Meshing with friends

Scott told me I needed to get off Suzy’s site and blog more.  I suppose I have been distracted lately…

But anyway, let me get caught up here. 

Saturday night Scott treated me to a special night out.  (Extra points for Scott for continuing to spoil his wife!)  We called our babysitter, got dressed up (pretty quickly, mind you - Joshua had a baseball game that lasted 45 minutes longer than we thought!), and joined our friends at Mesh for a rather unique dining experience.  We had reservations for 8:45, the earliest we could get in when we tried to make reservations online that morning.  So if you are in the Cincinnati area and want to try this place out, then make your reservations early! 

We went ahead and showed up about an hour early.  We figured we could order appetizers and hang out at the bar until our table was ready, but it wasn’t 60 seconds after we all ordered drinks (a diet coke for the pregnant lady!) when they went ahead and called us back to our table. 

The restaurant itself had a rather contemporary feel to it, and the people were doing just what the restaurant called us to do, interact, or mesh together (at least with the people we knew). 

Here I am, tired but having fun!

The staff was very professional and friendly, and the food was a unique experience.  Here are some pics of the food Scott and I enjoyed:

Compliments of the chef…it was a very delicious bite.  I could have eaten 10 more.

 

Oysters the only way my husband will eat them…COOKED!

 

I ordered the Iceburg wedge salad simply because it was the easiest one to omit the things I can not eat while pregnant.  (Like Bleu cheese!)

 

Scott’s steak and tuna.  (Can’t remember what it was called on the menu).  He ordered his medium, he got it rare.  So if you eat there, keep that in mind!  As you can see, the tuna is also not cooked all the way, so I didn’t take a bite of either!

 

My dish - Tilapia with couscous? in a saffron sauce.  Naturally, it just happened to be one of Saturday night’s special.  I ordered it thinking it sounded good AND really, how expensive can fish be?  Ha!  Should have asked!  Mine was one of the more expensive dishes.  Take one more look at my $44 cut of fish.  All in all, the dish was not bad, PLUS it was cooked all the way!  ;)  But I probably would have gone for the pasta dish had I asked how much the special cost!

 

The best part (of course)!  This is their “famous” Chocolate Bailey’s cheesecake cake, bragged to be “Best Restaurant Dessert” in America by USA Today.  It was good, but I liked the chocolate on both sides of the cake better. 

It was a fun night as we sat at the table and chatted with our friends (without kids interrupting!)  In fact, I don’t remember seeing a kid in sight, which was probably a good thing considering the table behind us, seating a large group of people, laughed and joked about one lady’s birthday presents she just happened to be opening up right then and there.  (Yes, she really did say it was a blow job kit).  Not a G-rated environment! 

And just to make things funny for us, (and not in an x-rated way!) we got the bill and our friend asked the server to split the bill 50/50 between our cards, only we had 2 gift cards, leaving us with a balance of about $15 and our friends with a bigger balance on their one card. 

As the server walked away, I joked with Scott that our friend secretly switched out the gift cards, adding it to his credit card.  When the server came back, she’d actually charged our credit card for half the cost of the total bill and our friend’s card had the remaining $15 balance!  It was actually pretty funny after I made such a fuss about our “cheating friend” switching out the cards. 

Seriously though, this restaurant is not a cheap dining experience, so unless you are really intending to splurge…hey, I don’t need to remind you, you saw my plate!  ;) 

But if you do want to save some money, go run by Costco and see if they still have the Mesh gift cards available.  You pay $80 and get $100 worth in gift cards, gaining $20.  So if you are going to Mesh, stop by Costco first!