Tony Mandola's Gulf Coast Kitchen and birthday

So little known to most of the world, but it was actually my birthday today. Thanks Rockets for a freakin awesome 22 STRAIGHT =) nice present for sure.

So we made reservations at Tony Mandola's Gulf Coast Kitchen out in the River Oaks area. I generally do a really low key family dinner on my bday and this was no different.

I had the special of the day with fresh whole flounder stuffed with pico de gallo and muenster cheese with a nicely prepared broccoli rabe and cajun rice. We also had some fresh snapper and ciopino at the table as well.

I have to say, Salvalda, our waitress was absolutely a hoot and took very good care of us. Service was excellent and I would recommend the place on that alone.

The flounder was very good, although the flavor of the meat wasn't quite as rich as I'm used to for Gulf Coast flounder. I'm not quite sure why that is. I could have used a bit more muenster, but that might be because the fish wasn't quite rich enough. The rabe was excellent, and I will most definitely be using that more often in my own cooking! (yeah, I know, I seem to be more excited about the side dish rather than the main course... )

I wouldn't order the Ciopino. Although the seafood in it was very good, the soup itself was overly sweet for some reason and I wouldn't be able to eat a full bowl of the stuff.

We of course had dessert - Banana Key Lime pie, Warm Bread Pudding with rum sauce, and an off the menu dessert that had mounds of coffee icecream between two large puff pastries and loads of chocolate poured over the whole thing (sorry, i don't remember the name).

I especially enjoyed the bread pudding as I am a big fan of the stuff. Always like to see the golden raisins and the white rum sauce was quite good.

The coffee icecream seemed a bit run of the mill though and that just didn't do too much for me in the whole scheme of that particular dessert.

The banana key lime pie really worked pretty well together, but I think I like that key lime pie is supposed to have a little bit of a pucker factor, and the banana just took all of that away, so maybe I was just thrown off a bit.

All said, again, service was absolutely top notch and fun, so I would go just for that. The food was good, but not quite as good as the 30-40 per person that we paid. I would stick with some of the more reasonably priced items and try to get out of there around 20-30 per person and it would be about right.