The Chef and His Wife

My husband was on call for New Year’s Eve which means we couldn’t eat out any further than about 20 minutes from our house. Since we live in Soddy Daisy, this presented a dilemma. Because I have a food blog, I cook all the time, so on holidays I want a day off. I saw an ad for The Chef and His Wife’s New Year’s Eve dinner in the paper and it sounded perfect. The dinner included prime rib, lobster bisque, shrimp scampi, rolls, a salad, green beans, twice cooked potatoes, and chocolate peppermint cheesecake. It even included real plates, a candle, a couple of cookies, and festive plastic cutlery and noisemakers!
As a food blogger, I was pleased with the plates! They were a creamy white with a simple black striped border. I will be able to use them for my food photos. I also kept the plastic champagne flutes because one never knows when the occasion might arise that you need them!
We started off with the lobster bisque. It was rich and creamy with shredded lobster. A few larger bites of lobster would have been nice, but even so it was very good. It made two smaller portions of soup, just right for a starter.
I admit when I first opened the shrimp scampi I thought it didn’t look like very generous portions. However, after the rich lobster bisque, it turned out the size was just right. The shrimp was tender and cooked perfectly, the sauce was rich with not too much garlic.
The part of the dinner I was most worried about was the prime rib. How good would it be packaged up and reheated? Turns out I had no worries, it was wonderful! It was cooked perfectly and the gentle reheating brought it up to the perfect temperature. My only problem with the main part of the dinner were the heating instructions. The prime rib, green beans and potatoes were packed together and given the instructions to heat at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time. The heat and time were perfect for the prime rib, but they were not enough for the dense potatoes. The potatoes should have been packaged separately, with different instructions so that they could have gotten hot. The green beans were a little over cooked for my taste, but I know a lot of people, especially here in the south, like them that way. The prime rib more than made up for any issues with the potatoes or green beans though!
The peppermint chocolate cheesecake was delicious and the perfect ending to the meal. If you are wondering why I haven’t mentioned the salad, it’s because we saved it for the next day. It was a large salad and with the soup and scampi, we felt like we had plenty of food. It was perfect for lunch the next day with a few leftover bites of prime rib.
Overall, we were very impressed with our food. I would not hesitate to pick up dinner from The Chef and His Wife. When I picked up our dinner, they told me that they would be moving from the current location. A new location hadn’t been chosen yet, but they were considering an option in Hixson. After perusing their current menu, I definitely have my eye on their 4 serving cherry pie for only $ 6.49!