‘gnocchi’

Por Ti Funghi, Volare

June 15th, 2011 Tweet Facebook Digg Stumble Reddit

Hole in the wall?

While in San Diego with a couple of runners the night before the Rock and Roll Marathon, we needed some carbs.  I wasn’t running, but I am never one to turn down a carbo-load.  Knowing nothing of Italian food in San Diego and not really wanting to go to Olive Garden (no offense to the Garden, but we wanted to support something local), we turned to Urban Spoon.  Yes, there’s an app for that.  This directed us to Volare, a sort of whole in the wall in a sort of sketchy part of town.  It looked perfect. Continue Reading»

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Eating Alone at Food Fair by Diego

October 25th, 2010 Tweet Facebook Digg Stumble Reddit

It's a fair of gnocchi.

A long long time ago, the girlfriend and I went on a binge of buying up restaurant gift certificates.  They would have specials like $20 for $10 and other such things that seemed like no-brainers.  Fast forward to six months later and loads of these gift certificates are sitting around collecting dust.  We could take it no more and decided to use one at a restaurant called Food Fair by Diego.  It is in the strange area that is sort of West Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Melrose or something like that, so even though the name sounded like it would be a pretentious joint (how many typical restaurants put the chef’s name in the restaurant name, it actually turned out to be in a one of those corner strips and was kind of a hole in the wall. Continue Reading»

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More Than Ice Cream at Al Gelato

May 14th, 2010 Tweet Facebook Digg Stumble Reddit

Leaf!

With a name like Al Gelato, you kind of expect to be walking into a gelato shop.  This is not the case with Al Gelato in Beverly Hills.  Sure, the place has gelato, but it is also a full-on Italian restaurant.  Aside from realizing that it wasn’t just a gelato place, I also found that Al Gelato didn’t carry a lot of the pretension that Italian restaurants seem to have.  There was no mood lighting, no fancy table cloths and no people with strange accents that weren’t quite Italian.  Despite this, I found that the prices still fell into what you would expect in Beverly Hills, with very little under 10 bucks and pasta prices jumping up to 15 if you wanted any meat. Continue Reading»

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Surprised by Spumoni

April 26th, 2010 Tweet Facebook Digg Stumble Reddit

Meat and potatoes.

We headed over to Santa Monica to grab some pizza.  Unfortunately, once we had parked and filled the meter, we realized that the pizza place we wanted no longer existed.  Unwilling to let a few quarters go to waste, we decided to take a little walk and see if any other restaurant might be able to tickle our fancy.  What we found was Spumoni.  Though not a pizza place, at least it was Italian. Continue Reading»

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A Wine Cellar Dinner at Bottle Inn

September 14th, 2009 Tweet Facebook Digg Stumble Reddit
Little green lumps of happiness

Little green lumps of happiness

For a restaurant called the Bottle Inn, you would expect them to have a great selection of wines.  What you wouldn’t expect, however, is for their wine cellar to become a dining room.  Nonetheless, if you have a big enough group, that is where they seat you.  It’s almost like a tease to should you all the amazing wines you could be drinking, yet it’s still pretty damn cool.  Although the wine was quite distracting, I was able to take my mind off of it long enough to read the menu.

Everything on the menu looked amazing and it took me a long time to decide, but in the end it had to be the Gnocchi al Pesto.  While waiting, we drank some fine Napa wine and stared at the stack of Opus wine that was probably worth more than my life. Continue Reading»

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Going Global at Plan Check

Fries of the world.

A couple of weeks ago, The Backyard Bite invited me to The Burger Culture Clash, sponsored by Stussy (which apparently still exists) and Plan Check. Plan Check, by the way, is a sort of new (since February) restaurant in West LA with Chef Ernesto Uchimura of Umami Burger fame. As my love of burgers, especially those of the umami variety, I jumped at the opportunity.

Although I arrived alone, I was not the only lone eater. Just next to where I was seated, I met e*star LA and we decided to share a meal called loneliness, because it’s better than eating alone. We made quick friends over our respective blogs and Midwestern roots, then got to work at dissecting the special menu, which Plan Check will be featuring for the next month if anything tickles your fancy.

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A little stretch before eating at Don Pichon.

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