Instead of taking your date out to a restaurant, invite them over for dinner at your place. You don’t have to be a trained chef in order to wow your date with a romantic meal — you only need a few recipes and tips to make the dinner unforgettable. If you follow this simple guide, your date will be both surprised and impressed.
Starters
Show your date that you are amazing in the kitchen, even when it comes to the finer details. Set the table with small bowls of appetizers like roasted almonds, red grapes, olives or cornichons. Place a bread basket and a bottle of high-quality olive oil in the center of the table — make sure to get the bread fresh from a bakery and warm it in the oven before serving.
First Course
Impress your date with your skills in the kitchen by bringing out risotto as the first course. Not all recipes require you to stand in front of the stove and stir the pot for half the night — you can make a creamy and delicious oven risotto with kale pesto. You can make the course look like it came out of a restaurant kitchen by adding toasted walnuts for texture and grated aged Parmesan.
Second Course
When you start your dinner with a rich first course like risotto, make sure that your next course is not heavy or overly indulgent. Serving a large piece of steak or another pasta dish could make your date feel full or even a little sick. Try a for a lighter entrée like pan-seared branzino covered in a medley of tomato and capers. Find branzino fillets at a local fish market and buy them on the day of the date, so that they are as fresh as possible.
Dessert
While you have gone strictly Italian with your main courses, consider going for a completely different cuisine for dessert. Instead of bringing out a plate of tiramisu, surprise your date with a refreshing mochi ice cream sundae. Mochi ice cream is a unique dessert made of a scoop of rich ice cream covered in a sweetened rice dough.
Buy a package of green tea mochi ice cream and place two spheres into a clean cocktail glass. Make sure that you purchase the package with green tea mochi flavor for your dessert, because green tea is a palate cleanser. Dress the ice cream with fresh raspberries or slices of mango, then drizzle with honey and toasted sesame seeds. If you want to really impress your date, decorate the dish with a few edible flowers — some violets would be a perfect choice that will also look beautiful on top of the green dessert.
In order to make your dinner feel as high-end as a night in an expensive restaurant, plan all of your courses ahead of time. Start the night by setting out gourmet appetizers, then amaze your date with a first course of risotto, followed by a second course of seared branzino. Then finish the dinner with a surprise of green tea mochi ice cream decked in wildflowers. With this guide, you can woo your date so that they will never forget this dinner or the gentleman who made it.
