Hotel Bel Air

on Saturday evening Ray and I went out to dinner at the Hotel Bel Air.


we've been before, and a friend of ours decided to get us a gift certificate for a wedding/1st anniversary present. the Hotel is located in Bel Air amongst beautiful mansions. like multi-million dollar mansions. like, I would give my right arm to live in these mansions. the neighborhood is just gorgeous. you know how in Beverly Hills, 90210 the cool kids lived north of Sunset? yeah, they lived here.

anyway, we started off with a caesar salad for me (with a whole anchovy resting on a toasted crouton, delish), tortilla soup for Ray and, being suckers for anything sushi, hamachi sashimi niçoise. Ray has always loved the tortilla soup here, and tonight was no exception. my caesar salad was fantastic and the hamachi just melted in your mouth. for our main course, we each had the Huckleberry Braised Short Rib with Blue Cheese Polenta. simply delectable. an explosion of flavor. there were even whole roasted cloves of garlic that were amazingly sweet and some type of wild mushrooms that I don't even know. we then moved on to dessert. we had a trio sampler that included a citrus souffle, tangerine sorbet and a slice of coffee cake.

anyone care to guess our grand total? $192. yes. our gift card was for $150. with tip, we still managed to spend $72 of our own moo-la. now, I enjoy Hotel Bel Air. the food is pretty darn good. and I admit that we really didn't hold back on anything that we ordered, but Ray and I agreed that it is not worth the price (Ray had 2 Grey Goose dirty martinis to the tune of $19 a piece!!). there are so many other places in L.A. that you can go and have amazing food for much less. now, will we go back at some point? of course. we do enjoy it. and you can get out of there spending less than $100 for two people (the Short Ribs were only $32 each). but it will certainly be a while until we return.