The best meal of my life:

Nobu Las Vegas

Roy and I had reservations for 9:15 and arrived right on time, and were seated immediatly. Excellent. Roy said he trusted my judgement and to just order a bunch of things that I thought would be awesome and we'd split it all.

I picked the following 6 items:

Yellowtail Sashimi with Jalapeno
Lobster Ceviche
Tiradito 'Live Scallop'
'Kumamoto' Oyster with Nobu Sauces
Squid 'Pasta' with Light Garlic Sauce
Black Cod with Miso

Yellowtail Sashimi with Jalapeno:

I had this at the Nobu in the Atlantis and loved it. Again, it didn't dissappoint. Very fresh sashimi with a thin slice of jalapeno on each, with a delicious slightly spicy sauce. Really fresh and delicious. It has a really light clean taste. The richness of the fish and the heat from the sauce/jalapeno balanced really well together.

Lobster Ceviche

Butter lettuce cup with some thinly sliced cucumber, red onion, cherry tomato, and fresh lobster. We were instructed by the server that this is to be eaten like a cabbage/lettuce wrap. To me, this one was a bit of a miss. I felt like the raw red onion overpowered the delicate flavor of the lobster. It was certainly not a bad dish, but I wouldn't order it again. Roy thought the onion was spot on, but also thought the dish was one of the less spectacular dishes.

Tiradito 'Live Scallop'

Roy and I didn't know what to expect here. Scallop sashimi is probably my favorite plain sashimi to get at a good sushi place, so I figured I'd like whatever they brought here. Wow, I was pretty impressed with this dish. The presentation was great. It was about 1 or 2 big scallops worth of thinly sliced scallop sashimi. Each slice had some fresh black pepper (but it wasn't standard black pepper I don't think. It was more like flakes instead of chunks of a peppercorn. Almost like the sea salt, of black papper.), a tiny tiny piece of cilantro in the center, with a drop of a chile sauce on it. It looked absolutely amazing and the flavors blended absolutely perfectly.



'Kumamoto' Oyster with Nobu Sauces

I guess with this there are 3 sauces it can come with and the chef sort of arbitrarily decides which to give you. Ours was something like a bruschetta topping, but without all the balsamic. Basically just a light tomato/herb/spice mixture. This was another dish that I didn't like much. Roy exclaimed that his was the best oyster he's ever had. They were a bit small, and not as briney as I like. I prefer my oysters bigger and with a little cocktail sauce. Nice and simple. Maybe a little squirt of lemon juice.

Squid 'Pasta' with Light Garlic Sauce

I thought this would be like Squid cut to form very long thin strips, like mock spaghetti, but instead it was like mock castellane. It also had a lot of shitake mushrooms and baby asparagus. I thought this dish was great. The sauce was mild enough that you were tasting the fresh ingredients, but it definately added a nice flavor. The contrast of colors and textures in this dish were really great. The squid isn't chewy, but has a pleasent resistance to bite. The mushrooms are soft but not mushy, and the asparagus have a nice crunch.

Castellane:


Black Cod with Miso

This is a cooked piece of black cod with a sweet miso sauce. I also had this at Nobu Atlantis before and liked it very much. Roy didn't care much for this dish, thinking the sauce was too sweet. I thought it was just right. The fish was nice and moist and flavorful. It was cooked just right, there isn't much worse than overcooked seafood. It's pretty rare that you have fish that's seasoned with something that's sweet, so I think this is a pretty excellent treat.

Roy and I decided this food was too great, and we weren't quite full yet.

We ended up getting another order of the oysters (silly Roy), the yellowtail, and also trying one new dish:

Monkfish Pate with Caviar:

It is just what it sounds like, and it came with a pretty nice thin mustard sauce. Unfortunately, neither Roy or I much care for Monkfish Pate, but we did not know this until we tried it. I think it was probably pretty good for what it was, but it's not really something I liked. We thought it would be more like Foie Gras, but it was quite a bit more firm and dry.

annnnd dessert.

Milk Chocolate Mousse Filled with Vanilla Cream, Caramelized Salted Nuts with a Raspberry Reduction Sauce, and Strawberry Balsamic Sorbet.

The mousse was quite delicious. Smooth and light, but still rich and flavorful. On top there was a paper thin melted sugar.........thing. It made for a neat presentation. I was hoping to taste more balsamic in the sorbet, but it ended up just being more like a really delicious strawberry sorbet with a little hint of something else. It was topped with gold flakes which looked nice and made us feel a bit more wealthy than we really are. Overall a very delicious dessert, but I personally was slightly letdown by the proposition of a creative sorbet that turned out to be "just" deliciously standard.

On my honeymoon in Bahias de Huatulco, Oaxaca, Mexico. Huatulco is an eco-friendly tourist spot in the southern state of Oaxaca, popular with wealthy people from Mexico City. There are a few resorts around Tangolunda Bay, the meal was at the Club Med.:

We started with top shelf vodka martinis. The sun was setting as we started. It was the first week of January, which is a big vacation week in Mexico. Mexicans on vacation tend to eat quite late, so we had the place to ourselves. We got a bottle of French red wine. The first course was gazpacho, a cold cucumber based soup. The main course was fillet mignon with roasted squash and a mix of colorful potatoes. As we were finishing the main course, the place started to fill up, and a fashion show broke out, with two models walking among the diners in different outfits every 10 minutes or so. For dessert we had a Mexican custard that was amazing. We ordered another bottle of wine and people watched the rest of the night. Oh, total bill was < $100 US. Huatulco.

The place is on the lower left in this picture:

Best meal of my life...


Was at Nana Grill in Dallas (at the top of the Anatole Hotel) where I had the best steak EVER and tons of great wine. My brother worked there and took me out to eat there, along with our mother, for my 21st birthday.

FOOD
We started off with some liquid baked potato soup that was pretty good. Then the Chef made us some palate-cleansing pizza cracker things that were wonderful.

Next, I had raw minced salmon with a passion fruit sauce. I enjoyed this even though im not a fan of raw fish.

Then, some grilled quail that was marvelous. It had a sweet and smokey glaze on it.

And THE HIGHLIGHT OF THE MEAL was the best steak I've ever had. A 45 day aged prime bone in ribeye cooked over an open wood flame. It was much better than the steak I had at Delmonico in LV with Xas and Roy. Not that the steak at Delmonico was bad. It was the second best steak I ever had. But the steak at Nana is just on another level. The steak isn't always actually listed on the menu, but it is always available.

Dessert.
We had the "desert sampler" which consisted of a chocolate cake, peanut butter and jelly, and something else that I dont remember (LOL).
The chocalate cake had warm chocolate syrup inside of it. Voted best dessert in Dallas so I had high expectations which it did not meet. It was good but not anything spectatcular.
Peanut butter and Jelly was badass. It was not an actualy PB&J. It was peanut butter mousse and strawberry jelly ice cream with a toasted bread/cracker thing. And when eaten all together it tasted like a PB&J but with a different texture. It was very unique and I really enjoyed it.

WINE WINE WINE
What really set this dining experience over the edge was all very nice glasses of wine we had to compliment each part of the meal. My brother was the guy who goes to the tables and reccommends/sells wine to the guests (I dont remember the official name for it). Therefore, his boss was the head wine director for the restaurant. Anyways, his boss was there and selected and brought out specific wines for each course we had. I think we had about 10 glasses all together and every one was EXCELLENT. The one that stood out the most was the '77 port that we had with dessert. It was amazing.

The bill came out to be almost 1k (due mostly to the $20-$50 glasses of wine we were drinking) however the whole thing was comped.