All you have to do is pop food in the oven (Image: Ketsuda Phoutinane)
Valentine’s Day dining can often be a disappointment – with pricey set menus and the awkwardness of mass couple dining, it’s no wonder many opt for a cosier alternative.
I love food and plan whole holidays around restaurants, but the idea of staying in on the day of love has its appeal.
Enter Côte’s – a concept that combines luxury with convenience.
Côte, the French-British restaurant chain with over 70 branches all over the UK, is offering such a treat through its Côte at Home service, promising “luxury food delivered to your door”.
The selection sounds seriously good: starter of baked Camembert or seared scallops, followed by a main course featuring your choice of duck confit, Lobster Thermidor, or Chateaubriand with two sides. To finish, there’s a choice between cherry lattice tarts or crème caramel.
Prices for these indulgent boxes for two range from £39.95 to £99.95.
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Côte at Home Valentine’s Day deluxe meal box (Image: Ketsuda Phoutinane)
Côte at Home’s Valentine’s Day meal box review
First impressions
The £99.95 meal box arrives in a pastel pink box, packed full with delights such as Camembert accompanied by bread and cornichons, Lobster Thermidor, fries, broccoli with aioli, and crème caramel and Madeleines.
There’s even an optional lobster cracker to complete the set.
A meticulously planned booklet provides a detailed guide of each course and instructions on how to prepare it – or more accurately, how to warm it up.
Everything is straightforward to put together (Image: Ketsuda Phoutinane)
Not pretty, but delicious (Image: Ketsuda Phoutinane)
First course: baked Camembert
This rich, creamy, and oozing delicacy is always a hit, except perhaps on Valentine’s Day.
The strong aroma of Camembert doesn’t exactly evoke romantic sentiments, but who am I to judge when I’m attending this date in joggers?
Lacking a small baking dish, I place the 125g wheel of Camembert on a baking tray, score it, and drizzle with the provided honey as directed. The bread loaf joins it in the oven five minutes later.
Unrestrained, the cheese melts into an unphotogenic but gooey delight that I eagerly mop up with bread and follow with cornichon. It tastes as you’d expect baked Camembert to taste (warm and delicious), but the bread is disappointingly pale and soft.
A standard fresh loaf of bread from the supermarket would have been a better choice.
[RECIPE] [EXPERT]
The main course before (Image: Ketsuda Phoutinane)
Main course: Lobster Thermidor
As a seafood enthusiast, I was somewhat doubtful how well lobster would reheat. However, the prospect of two lobsters for a quiet night in was thrilling and extravagant – an appropriate Valentine’s Day meal.
Lobster Thermidor is traditionally prepared with cooked lobster meat combined with a rich, creamy wine-based sauce. This mixture is then stuffed back into the lobster shell and browned.
In this version, you just spoon Thermidor sauce over pre-cooked lobster and bake. It includes two tubs of sauce, but one seems to be the perfect amount.
The fries and broccoli are meant to go in the oven later, with all three components designed to finish cooking simultaneously. However, the timing wasn’t as flawless in practice.
The main course after (Image: Ketsuda Phoutinane)
The lobster required additional time under the grill to achieve the same bronzed finish as shown in the manual. Unfortunately, we couldn’t revive the pre-cooked and limp broccoli and chips even with the grill.
It’s a pity because we could have easily pan-fried the tenderstem broccoli while everything else was heating up in the oven. The lobster was delightful and meaty, albeit a bit chewier than ones I’ve had before, and the savoury, creamy thermidor sauce was a hit the right note.
We then teamed up to extract as much lobster meat from the claws using the accompanying cracker – a fun but messy task I’m glad not to be doing in public. For this, we deviated from the script and melted salted butter in the microwave to dip the lobster we’d foraged.
Dessert was a showstopper (Image: Ketsuda Phoutinane)
Dessert: crème caramel
To round off this French dinner, classic crème caramel was dessert. Creamy yet light, it felt like a natural conclusion to this extravagant meal.
The crème caramels arrived in lovely ceramic pots that I plan to repurpose as bud vases. We upend them and give them a good shake, but to no avail. It was easy enough to slide a butter knife between the pot and caramel to loosen but not slice the delicate dessert.
The creme caramel dessert plops out of the pot, cascading with caramel sauce onto which you drizzle on warmed up caramel. The combination of bitter caramel, cold creamy custard and tender, buttery warm Madeleine cookie was my the most delightful part of the meal.
Though my husband has a massive sweet tooth, he doesn’t like cold food, so it’s more for me.
A hard night’s work (Image: Ketsuda Phoutinane)
Final thoughts
The deluxe Côte meal box, priced at £99.95, offers great value for money with the sheer quantity of food and expensive ingredients. While I was given a sample, £50 a person seems a fair price considering you get two lobsters.
While it would have been fresher to dine in a restaurant, this luxurious meal meant we could step outside our comfort zone and have lobster at home.
And there’s nothing quite like bonding over the challenge of cracking open lobster shells.
For more information or to book, visit .