Over the last few weeks, the Husband and I have each been traveling separately and when we’ve been home, we’ve had visitors and/or only been around for a few days at a time.  Although we really enjoyed our mini vacation to Chicago a few weeks ago, we haven’t had a date night in forever and made a point to have one Saturday night We really are loving The District (which is good since we semi chose where to live to be in walking distance to it!) so we decided to use up free movie tickets to the movie theatre at Green Valley Ranch resort.  We saw the 5pm showing of Knight and Day (fun but the plot line had more holes than swiss cheese!) and then headed over to the District to find a place to eat.  We stood around and debated for a few, but knowing that we’ll hit all of the restaurants within a year we chose to go with King’s Fish House for a good dinner.

The restaurant had a nice looking outdoor patio but since it was still about 108 degrees at 7:30pm, we opted for the air-conditioned indoor restaurant

Inside, there was no wait and we were seated promptly by the friendly host staff.  Then we began looking over the menu… which is huge.  As people who like seafood, but don’t eat it often, the menu was actually a bit overwhelming.  Personally, I want to branch out and try more fish, but at $20 or so per entree, it makes me nervous to order something I haven’t tried before.  (What’s your favorite type of fish to order at a restaurant?)

You know you love my shadow

I figured out that the drinks were on the back (there was also a separate menu for cocktails and one for sushi).  Our server, Alex, stopped by to see if we had any questions and to take our drink orders.  The Husband and I were both feeling beers (and water!) to refresh us from the heat.

We each decided to order the King Crab Honey Ale from Irvine, CA (12oz for me on the left and 16oz for him).  I really liked it (the honey sweetness hit the spot) but the Husband was less of a fan.  He felt that the bitter to sweet balance was off.

While we spent some extra time perusing the menu, we were brought a plate of sourdough bread and butter.  It was the perfect combo of warm and soft on the inside and crusty on the outside.

As we were trying to decide, we learned from our server that the fish in the Charbroiler section as well as the oysters arrive fresh EVERY DAY! Pretty cool and helps justify the price of a lot of the fish entrees.

Each of the entrees (unless otherwise noted) came with two “sidekicks.”  Who can guess what one of ours was going to be??

As we waited for our meals, I flipped through the usual flipchart on the table.  This one was way cooler! It had a diagram for how to eat crawfish as well as how to eat lobster.  Additionally, there were sheets with fun explanations about fish such as swordfish.  Very informative yet fun!

With the entrees, you could get a soup or salad for a few dollars more so the Husband ordered a side salad.  It was just the usual – greens, tomatoes, croutons with blue cheese dressing on the side.

It was an enjoyable salad but about halfway through, our entrees arrived! It made us feel quite rushed :-/ The problem may have been that another server brought our entrees out but the system should be a bit more better timed.

I ordered the Yellowfin Ahi Tuna which was supposed to be rare.  Unfortunately, it didn’t arrive that way I’m not a fan of sending things back unless there’s something extremely wrong so I tried it as is.  It was still moist and quite fresh so I enjoyed about half so I could enjoy the other items on the plate.  Of course, I ordered the mac n cheese.  It was great! I also had the sauteed spinach which was very, very good.  I have spinach and tuna saved for lunch tomorrow.  Yum!

The Husband ordered the Wild Mexican Jumbo White Shrimp.  It might not seem like it, but there was a lot of them (hidden in the back of the plate).  He was very impressed with the freshness and the seasoning.  He thought they were excellent.  He also had mac n cheese (love) and also the Northwest Vegetables which included sugar snap peas, carmelized shallots (so good!), and carrots.

After our main courses, I caught a picture of the Husband leafing through our new Entertainment Book We just took them up on an offer for a free 2010 Entertainment Book (plus shipping) and a discount on automatic renewal.  We figure with the frequency of eating out and activities we try to do, we would make back the value of the book in less than six months each year.  We’re looking forward to trying out all sorts of restaurants in the book!

One of the seasonal items on the menu quickly caught both the Husband’s and my eye.  I recently tried out a Strawberry Shortcake recipe in my favorite cookbook: Good Housekeeping.  It was the first time I had made a traditional shortcake (I grew up eating strawberry shortcake on angel food cake) and it turned out so well (I’ve actually made it twice in the last six weeks).  We were interested to see if the King’s Fish version was as good as mine It was pretty darn close! It was a great size for sharing – not too much for either of us and not too little.  The only real difference between theirs and mine was that it was obvious that they put it together just before serving (which makes sense), but if you let the fruit sit on the cake for a while, the juices and sugar soak in making the cake melt-in-your-mouth.  We did enjoy this though.

Overall, we were impressed with King’s Fish House and were glad we chose it for our date night dinner.  The service was very good and, while I felt it was a pretty expensive dinner for a casual place, the freshness of the food (particularly since it’s fish and clearly we’re not on the water here in Las Vegas – the lakes don’t count!) validated the price.  We do recommend this place if you’re looking to try a variety of fresh fishes in cooked in a handful of ways.  Perhaps we’ll be back soon to try out their sushi.