The Reading Room

Reading Room Review

Just last weekend my best friend and I went on a double date to the Reading Room in downtown St. Petersburg. All four of us were super excited for our reservation that we had planned for a couple of weeks.  After reading several reviews and looking at tons of pictures of the atmosphere and the food, I was expecting to be blown away- that being said, before I get into details; none of the food was bad, it just wasn't as amazing as everyone made it out to seem.  My friends and I were, slightly disappointed, due to the money we spent, and nothing was extraordinarily good. 

Place Setting

As for the atmosphere, our reservation was at 6:30, at this time the restaurant was quiet and there was only a few other tables, around 7:15 the restaurant started to fill up, and it got rather loud, however we were at table near the center of the restaurant.  There was also 2 larger parties that arrived just as we were finishing up, and they were rather loud as well.  The tables were set beautifully with pink plates and grey napkins the colors went together very well and I loved how classy it looked.  The overall setup on the inside of the restaurant was cute and classy, it had a simplistic and aesthetic look.  They also had a beautiful outdoor area, with couches and picnic tables.

Flower centerpiece on the table 

Our service wasn't outstanding but definitely wasn't bad.  She was attentive to the table for the most part, but the evening wasn't overly personalized- it didn't have anything outstanding to make me say "wow I can't wait to go back!"  Overall, the service was good though, hostess and server were both polite, and made sure we had everything we needed. 

Now onto the food-

The Reading Room suggests that you get many things and share with the table, because the plates are small to encourage you to try more foods.  We ordered tons of different things and like I said previously nothing was bad, just for the price we paid I felt that nothing blew my socks off.  

Banana Leaf Steamed Grouper

Personally I got the Banana leaf steamed fish, it came with coconut cream grains, peas and curry.  The fish for the day was grouper.  Let me just say that I've had a lot of grouper in my life, living in Florida and right on the beach, grouper is a common fish to see on a menu, and it just didn't shock me with flavor.  The curry was really good, and the plate was set up beautifully but the fish just didn't have much flavor.

Beets Dish

We got several other things that I'm not going to describe in great detail so that this review isn't 3 pages long.  My favorite thing of the night was the Beets.  This sounded strange to me, a plate of beets? We had to try it.  It was really good, by far the dish with the most flavor, but how can you mess up beets really?  The dish was set beautifully just like everything else, it had marcona almonds, edible flowers and some other really neat features.  It was sweet and delicious.  This was definitely a dish to share, after a few bites of all of the components you were done, simply because it was so sweet- but again it was super flavorful.

Beets Dish Disassembled

 

Now we also, ordered bread and butter, mushrooms, salt and peppered quail, and chicken liver mousse.  Again, I'm just going to give a short description of these to keep this review short.  Apparently, I didn't get a picture of the chicken liver mousse but it was plated much like the bread and butter, and was served with a few crackers.

The quail, I personally didn't try, but the boys said the lemon,
salt and pepper sauce was too much. 

This is the "Shrooms" Dish.  It didn't have much flavor
or texture, it wasn't, bad but don't get it if you don't
love the flavor of mushrooms.

The Bread and Butter was really good.
The bread had a really nice flavor, and I love the
way this was plated. 

As a final opinion, I would say that it was definitely presentation that was there to wow you- not much for the flavor of the food.  The evening went well, but I wouldn't see myself really revisiting.  I'm glad I went in order to say that I've been there but I don't think it's somewhere you go too all the time. The restaurant says that they have fresh ingredients and I personally didn't taste that within the food, although you can see it because the garden is right outside, which is super neat.  This restaurant had so many ups and downs, I can really only say to go for yourself and try it out.

To help me explain the experience we had, I wanted to include the opinions from the other people with me, so I had Josh rank the food and the atmosphere from 1-10, and then the overall experience from 1-10.

Joshua- Food: 6 "It had good creativity but a lot of the flavor combinations didn't jive."

Atmosphere: 7.5 "It was louder than anticipated, but the aesthetics of a small reading room were impressive."

Overall: 6.5 "There was one big problem- it was presentation over taste."

From My Kitchen to Yours,
MallaryMade💗