Still looking for a place to have dinner with your valentine this weekend?  The Rock House in Houghton is offering some dinner specials: In addition to filet mignon there’s a chicken breast stuffed with spinach, artichoke hearts and a blend of cheeses.  If you want to add some surf to that turf, they’ll be happy to give you shrimp in lemon butter as an add-on to any meal.

Probably not the lowest-fat dishes ever concocted, but Valentine’s Day only comes once a year, right?  Besides, once you’re done you can go next door to the Mine Shaft and work it off with a few frames of bowling.

It’s nice to see some new options on the Houghton dining menu, perhaps enough to tide us over until De La Terre French bistro opens in Lake Linden in the spring.

Update: We did actually eat dinner there tonight, though none of the three people in our group ended up having the Valentine specials.  Two of us had dishes that featured flat iron steak (one a salad with candied walnuts, gorgonzola, romaine and roasted tomatoes, the other a more standard steak with veggies and rice).  The third person had a cheeseburger.  In every case the meals were fine, even pleasant, about what you’d expect from a restaurant attached to a bowling alley and arcade.

What wasn’t pleasant was the wait – it took about 30 minutes to get our three meals, and of course by that time they were no longer completely hot.  True, the restaurant was busy (as was the Mine Shaft), which is absolutely great to see, but it’s the kind of thing that will drive Houghton diners away if not corrected.  We get very used to not having to wait for anything around here, it’s one of the advantages of small town living.  The Rock House can do better; we’ll check back soon to see whether the timing issues have been resolved.