Date Night: Green Hour and Star Rover Sound

Date Night is a multipart road map for everyone who wants a nice evening out, but has no time to plan it. It’s for people who want to do more than just go to one restaurant and call it a night. It’s for overwhelmed parents who don’t get out often; for friends who visit the same three restaurants because they’re too afraid to try someplace new; and for busy folks who keep forgetting all the places they’ve driven past, heard about, seen on social and said, “Let’s remember that place next time we go out.”

It took a few days of getting my next-door neighbors’ mail while they were out of town to realize that the daily stack of envelopes — same size, stamp and script on the front — were RSVP cards. It took three seconds of Googling to figure out they’d eloped and were hosting a big celebration here in town. It took a lot longer to scroll through their registry. 

Oh, the marble serving board with glass cloche for keeping bugs at bay! Are you even an adult if you don’t have a cloche over your farmstead cheddar and runny brie? I was equally jealous of the deviled egg platter with hand-painted bees in the divots and the amber-swirl glass decanter — even though I have never, in almost two decades of marriage, decanted wine or made deviled eggs. 

While everything is shiny and new next door, the situation differs ever so slightly on my side of the fence. We don’t need platters — we need a will and increased retirement contributions. We could also use some time away to remember that we like each other, especially since I seriously considered making my husband Dom an anniversary card that read, “At least I don’t hate you as much as I did last year.” 

In an effort to reconnect to our newlywed days, on our recent Date Night in Germantown (which doubled as our 19th anniversary celebration), I asked Dom to park in front of the church where we got married. I thought being there might somehow infuse us with the spirit of our younger, lighter, less serious selves, but there was no magical, transformative moment. The closest we can come to feeling new to each other again is having new experiences together, and the next one was three blocks away.

Stop 1: Green Hour at Tempered Fine Chocolates

At 7 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, Tempered Fine Chocolates, the chocolatier and coffee shop near the corner of Madison Street and Fifth Avenue North, becomes Green Hour. It’s an absinthe and cocktail bar where the bartenders pair their house-made truffles with your drink, if you so desire — and I totally desire. 

Each table at Green Hour (and there are only a few) has an absinthe fountain, which is a glass water dispenser with slender spouts. When you twist the spout, water drips over a sugar cube that sits on an absinthe spoon set atop a glass of the anise-flavored liquor that’s potent enough to burn your taste buds if you sip it straight. I wanted so badly to participate in this ritual and visit with the infamous Green Fairy, but as romanced as I was by this sliver of a bar that feels like a secret, and the subtle green lighting that mirrors absinthe’s natural color, I knew that even a few sips of absinthe would be a one-way ticket to Headache Town. And no one here has time for that.

Green Hour’s cocktail and absinthe menu isn’t a piece of paper you squint at in the dark bar. It’s a screen on the wall made to look like movie credits. I ordered the Monkey’s Paw (toasted coconut rum, house butternut-sage shrub, white miso syrup, falernum, red wine syrup, dark rum float), and Dom went with the Far From the Tree (bourbon, lemon juice, Granny Smith apple syrup, honey). We had the option to pick our own chocolate pairings or have the bartenders do it, and I struggled with that: I like the idea of leaving it up to chance but might have a teeny tiny control problem. I related this to our server, Nate. 

“Let go,” he urged me. “This is your chance to let the universe guide you.”

Nate was right. It was fun to watch the bartenders stick a straw into each drink, release a few drops on their tongues and discuss what went best with each. We each received two truffles: orange balsamic and cassis to complement my rum cocktail and bourbon praline and sangria with Dom’s bourbon drink. Both of mine were too sweet and fruity for my personal taste, but it was fun to try flavors I never would’ve picked out myself. 

Dom liked the bourbon praline more than the sangria, but it didn’t stop him from wolfing both down. When he realized I bit each of my truffles in half so he could taste them too, he jabbed his thumb, which had a smudge of bourbon chocolate truffle on it, at me. 

“Here,” he said. “Lick this.” 

I declined his generous offer and instead picked out a few truffles to go: pumpkin pie, one of Tempered’s seasonal flavors, plus an Uncle Nearest Whiskey dark chocolate for Dom and two peanut butter milk chocolates for our teen, all of which were packaged in the most adorable box that fit easily in my clutch. And we walked toward the Cumberland River.

Stop 2: Star Rover Sound

I’ve been curious about Star Rover Sound since our visit last summer to Jacqueline, the seasonal raw bar outside The Optimist. A hallway of bathrooms separates the swanky seafood restaurant from a … what is this place? A Thursday-to-Sunday space where you can: A. have dinner and not see a show, B. have dinner and see a show, or C. just see a show. Choose your own adventure.   

To be clear, that dinner is going to be steak or chicken. Earlier this year, Star Rover Sound switched from a taqueria-style menu to a steak-dinner concept in which all you do is choose a cut — chopped steak, filet, ribeye, skirt steak, T-bone — or a double-cut chicken breast. 

Out of curiosity, I asked our server if there were any vegetarian options. 

“If you’re a vegetarian,” she said, “you probably shouldn’t go to a steakhouse.” 

Every steakhouse I can think of offers at least one fish and vegetable option, but OK. After overhearing this exchange, the hostess checked in with the kitchen and said they could do a vegetable plate or do a piece of fish from The Optimist for pescatarians.

We went with the filet and ribeye, which were well-seasoned and well-cooked and all the things they should be, even if they were the least memorable part of the meal. Salty, buttery “Opti rolls” and a massive dinner salad that comes out beforehand and a basket of steak fries and onion rings that’s served with it are all included in the price of the meal. 

Dom is a vinaigrette guy who snubs creamy salad dressings, so I thought the buttermilk dill with chunks of blue cheese — which covered a piled-high platter of lettuce with big rings of red onion, half moons of cucumber, bacon bits and butter-fried croutons — would get the thumbs-down from him. 

“This is exactly the kind of salad I want in a place like this,” he said.

There is something very nostalgic about Star Rover Sound’s steak dinners. It’s the kind of meal I imagine my parents having on the rare times they went out to dinner in the early ’80s, leaving my sister and me at home with Three’s Company and a high school babysitter. 

Here’s something I’ve never said about a restaurant before: I want it to feel a little dirtier. Grittier. If I’m eating steak and onion rings and am about to see a band, I don’t want to hear A-Ha, Fine Young Cannibals and Blondie. Warm me up with some Mickey Gilley, George Jones and Hank Jr. 

I got my classic country thanks to that evening’s performers, Boo Ray and his band, who played “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink,” “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” and the like before rolling out their own stuff. The room wasn’t full by any stretch, which is a shame, because Boo and the boys were a fine time. There were a handful of occupied tables — a group of ladies, two older gentlemen, a few couples who wandered down from The Optimist — plus a real-deal cowboy and his lady who looked like they were born with their boots on. 

This is exactly how I want to hear live music: in a small venue far from downtown with plenty of elbow room and a slice of chocolate chess pie on the table to share. Dom scooted his chair around next to mine and we watched and ate sidesaddle, like lovers do.