Our Favorite Annual Work Event: Dinner at the Blue Room!

One of my favorite parts of my job is organizing a social event every semester. Some of you may know that I have an Event Marketing background, and planning events is the one thing I miss more than anything! So once a semester, I get to do my thing!

I have changed a lot of the events that had become a tradition for our office. But the one that has remained the same is our November dinner at the Blue Room in Kendall Square. For the past 2 years I have worked with Lindsay and Robin, who are great! They are very accommodating in planning the menu and always do a great job pairing wines. In case you didn’t know, wine is kind-of their thing!

So Lara and I arrived about an hour early to make sure all is good. The room was set up beautifully, and I immediately was enamoured with the painting of Burt Reynolds on the back wall. Don’t ask me why, I just was.

So Lara and I had a drink and waited for the rest of the crowd.

The group started flooding in and the waitstaff did an amazing job of making sure everyone was taken care of. After 45 minutes of mingling, it was time to take our seats and let the feast begin!

First on the menu were the appetizers:  local farmer vegetable antipasto with crispy flatbread, gougères with Tuscan butter and cheese goat cheese & black pepper caramel, wood grilled pizza with roasted pear, mascarpone & walnuts. Come to think of it, there was no flatbread with the antipasto, but there was a fabulous rustic loaf.

Next up was the local apple, VT cheddar and toasted pecan salad. Meh. I wouldn’t order this salad again. The apple was good, but there was too much endive (that is what we think it was). And now that I type this, I don’t remember there being any cheddar on the salad. I also only tasted salt and pepper, not much of a dressing. That was all okay though, because the main course was on the way!

One of the great things about working with a good friend and fellow foodie is that you can share food! So, as we always do, Lara and I ordered two different meals to split. We chose the grilled skirt steak with harissa, cous-cous, mint and watercress salad and the hubbard squash gnocchi with tuscan kale, lentils, thyme brown butter sauce with parmigiano reggiano.

I was surprised by the look of the vegetarian meal. The gnocchi were more dumpling like than gnocchi, per-say. And on top of the lentils it took on a strange look. But none of that mattered when I took a bite, it was delicious, and matched perfectly with the lentils!

The skirt steak was cooked perfectly, pink in the middle with a nice char on the outside. Every bite of this meal was more delicious than the next!

The sad truth, that I was completely stuffed, was revealed to me when the pumpkin spice cake with rum raisin caramel was served. The caramel was SERIOUS! Unfortunately I was too stuffed to scoff down the whole dessert!

The added bonus, dinner was on work! Nothing beats a delicious meal that you don’t have to pay for! I don’t make it to the blue room very often. Maybe once a year for brunch, once for lunch on the patio, and once for our work event. But I look forward to it every single time. Hmm, maybe this is a good idea for an upcoming Boston Brunchers event….Let the planning continue!

A special thank you to my assistant photographer Lara for her great work on me and Burt, my favorite picture of the drink menu, and the artistic view of the skirt steak!