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I know some people may look at me and say “He looks like the kind of guy that eats dinner at the mall,” but I’m here to tell you it’s usually not true.

However, this past Friday I let my lady friend convince me that it would be acceptable to spend part of our Friday evening listening to a back end developer give a talk about web programming at General Assembly in Santa Monica. That was great and all (and there are a lot of cool classes coming up there soon) but afterward we were not willing to walk too far for dinner. I had recently heard about the Blue Stove in the Santa Monica Place Mall, inside Nordstrom.

So yes, in this one case, I did eat dinner at the mall.

It was interesting. As you can see from the photo above, our dishes were all fried. The things I’d noticed other patrons raving about were the Cilantro Lime Chicken Tacos, the Salt & Pepper Calamari, and the Short Rib Poutine so we went with that.

The Cilantro Lime Chicken Tacos were good, crunchy and fried, but tasty. I don’t ever really need fried food and I was hoping this would be a little fresher, but they did the job. They were tiny and came in a set of 4.

I ordered the Short Rib Poutine because I haven’t had poutine since I last visited Montreal years ago and I could not resist. Plus I just sat through an hour presentation about PHP, Python and Ruby on Rails so I needed the food equivalent of hiding under the covers for a while. This worked.

The calamari was also good. I’m from Rhode Island and I’ve had fried calamari with about 85% of the meals I ate growing up, and I will tell you that this was as good if not better than most I’ve tried.

Blue Stove also has a full bar and extensive wine list so this could be a good hiding place for anyone that happens to be married to a real Nordstrom enthusiast.

One selling point here is that Nordstrom apparently has a lot of amazing shoes, so if you’re an anxious shopper like me, maybe head to the Blue Stove and put yourself into a food coma before wobbling around the shoe section. I have my eye on some red dock siders.

Blue Stove
222 Broadway St
Santa Monica, CA 90401

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