Stella's Fish Cafe

I have to thank our friends Brent and Tatiana for suggesting this one, otherwise I don't know if Nate and I ever would have tried this place! I've heard of Stella's before, but it's in Uptown, where we don't get real often and just is one of those things I hadn't even thought of trying.

This past Saturday we met up with Brent and Tatiana and they suggested we go there for dinner because they have a roof top patio and it was a gorgeous, although a little chilly, evening. We headed down around 6:30 or so and had to wait a little bit for an outdoor table, but not too terribly long actually. Nate grabbed us a couple of beers and we had a nice bench to wait on and people watch.

The roof top is pretty high up, at the bottom of the stairs it says something like 72 stairs to the top, we took the stairs as it was faster than waiting for the elevator, but there is also an elevator to get up to the top. All of the tables are high tops with nice umbrellas.

Once we were seated we had a chance to look at the menu and it sounds like the options change daily, with a few standards that are there all of the time. This is definitely a place for those who like seafood - however, there was also barbequed ribs on the menu and a few salads that would work for people who don't care for seafood.

Nate and I decided on a sample platter that we could split that would have several options for us to try. It had grilled salmon, swordfish and scallops. Then we chose fried calamari to split. Brent ordered grilled salmon for himself and Tatiana went the route of ordering a couple of appetizers for a meal, a spinach and crab dip and a dip with sushi grade tuna.

The food was up relatively fast and it was all so good! Tatiana was nice and shared her dip with us, it was kind of cream cheesey and there was bread for dipping and it was so tasty! The dip is a warm dip and it just kind of melts in your mouth. Then Nate and I dug into our platter. The calamari was good, it wasn't too tough, which is often times a problem with calamari. It came with a spicy chipotle dipping sauce, though I didn't think it was too spicy. That was ok with me though, I wouldn't have wanted it to be much hotter!

On our platter, my favorite was the scallops. I love scallops and these were terrific. The salmon was just ok I guess, it was cooked just fine and had kind of a mango/pineapple relish on top, but I'm not a huge salmon lover, so I could've taken or left that. I really enjoyed the swordfish though, it had kind of a creamy, lemony sauce over the top of it, was flaky and delicious! I even tried some of Tatiana's tuna dip even though I'm not a sushi girl and you know what? That was good too!

Nate and I also had garlic mashed potatoes on the side. They were very tasty, but we had enough food we could've done without them. You order all of your sides separately so it would've been easy to leave it out.

For dessert the four of us split a giant piece of red velvet cake. I don't know what all it was made out of, but man, it was good, chocolatey, creamy filling, very rich. It was a good thing we had four spoons for that one!

Overall I enjoyed Stella's alot. It was fun to sit on the patio even though it was rather chilly and windy. The food was moderately priced, a little more than we'd usually spend, so I don't know that we'd frequent there all that much, but I'd love to go back sometime. They have an indoor restaurant too, so you could still go there in the winter. So, I am thinking we'll be back there sometime!