Date Night In Dorchester

It's been a while since Andrew and I made the effort to go out somewhere decent for dinner (i.e. something different other than our weekly Bertucci's fix) but we were still feeling a bit lazy, so we picked something within walking distance on Thursday night.

While I had the chance to experience the Ledge soon after we had first moved into our house, this was the first time that Andrew got to eat there (not counting the fact that he had eaten my leftovers from my first meal).

We went with one of our traditional favorites, calamari. I have mixed feelings about Ledge's version of it. It didn't seem to have very much calamari (in the sense that there were numerous tiny bits of calamari with a thick bread coating). However, it almost wasn't a bad thing since the coating was very nice and crunchy. The dipping sauce was definitely meh, Andrew and I both agreed that it tasted like honey water (in flavor and consistency) so we avoided it for the most part. Full disclosure, we did end up cleaning the plate:

I had a hankering for seafood so I went with scallops accompanied by green beans and mashed potatoes. Everything was delicious and perfectly cooked and seasoned, so this was plate #2 that got cleaned completely. Andrew and I always joke at how restaurants give you a miniscule amount of scallops (we had guessed beforehand how much I would get and I had optimistically said at least five) but these were very big and tasty and I ended up slicing each one into four or five bites.

Andrew also went the seafood route, getting one of his favorites, fish and chips. Not much to say on this front except that he liked it and said the fries were surprisingly crispier than one would expect for steak fries. Since I'm not a fan of fries that are this thick and was stuffed from my own meal, I didn't even try filching a fry from his plate:

For dessert, we skipped the Ledge's menu and decided to try the ice cream shop that was on the same block as the restaurant:

What I didn't realize initially was that this was the type of store that does the Coldstone Creamery model - it had pretty plain ice cream flavors and you could pick mix-ins to get smushed up with the ice cream. The ice cream was good but I was disappointed by the lack of fruity mix-ins and missing almonds (most New England ice cream shops seem to avoid almonds). So I just ended up getting a plain scoop of chocolate chip ice cream. It was good, but I think I would've preferred an ice cream menu with more elaborate flavors. Andrew wasn't as picky as me, and really liked his vanilla ice cream with heath bar mix-ins.

We both ended up feeling uncomfortably stuffed for the rest of the night, so lesson learned - we'll skip the appetizer the next time we know we want to have dessert! But it was nice to slowly stroll with our ice cream in hand, enjoying the comfortable weather that seems to only come around at 8:30 pm these days.