Morton’s Steakhouse is having a Wine and Chocolate Event on Tuesday from 6 p.m. to 7:30 pm.
We are invited to stroll through the premises and sample decadent chocolate desserts, including Morton’s Legendary Hot Chocolate Cake and truffles paired with fine wines.
A series of petit fours and small chocolate indulgences also will be paired with wines. Two wines being poured that I know of are Sandeman Founders Reserve Porto and a Mariah Zinfandel.
It sounds like a lot of fun to me, the original chocoholic and one who never shies away from good wine.
The cost is $40 per person, which includes tax and gratuity. For reservations or more information: (714) 444-4834. Morton’s Steakhouse: 1641 West Sunflower Ave. (in South Coast Plaza Village), Santa Ana.
Wining and Dining
One of our favorite Italian restaurants is Vessia Ristorante in Irvine. When owner Franco Vessia opened this friendly place, much of Orange County’s business community quickly came through the doors. Vessia has just the right amount of suave personality and truly authentic food to put it on par with restaurants in Italy.
Those customers, combined with the rest of us who have discovered the flavors of Vessia, have remained fans. We have lunch, dinner and Sunday brunch,we always feel like we are within the soul of Italy in this charming place. And, we might be able to make it to the Wines of Piemonte Dinner this Wednesday. Hope you can, too.
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Morton’s: wine, chocolate focus of upcoming event |
Franco and his sidekick and super chef, Gino Buonanoce, have planned four courses of food and four fine wines. Assorted appetizers will be offered with Gavi di Gavi 2004 Broglia wine. Drum-shaped presentation of pasta layered with baby artichoke follows, along with 2003 Barbera di Asti Superiore, Poderi Alasia.
Next, roasted chop of wild boar (if you’ve never experienced the delicious pork taste of wild boar, then I am delighted that this is your opportunity) with cherry-Barolo sauce and polenta perfumed with gorgonzola cheese. The wine match is 2001 Barolo, Damilano. Dessert is Tortino all’Amareto, a light sponge cake with hazelnut mousse infused with amaretto liqueur to be matched with 2004 Moscato di Asti, Marenco. Have a lovely cup of coffee as you continue to relish the flavors of the evening.
Price is $65, plus tax and gratuity. Time is 6 p.m. on Wednesday. For reservations call (949) 654-1155. Vessia Ristorante is at 3966 Barranca Parkway (in Crossroads Center at Culver and Barranca), Irvine.
Sumptuous Wines
Wine Enthusiast magazine’s survey named Selby as one of the top 100 wineries. St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort and Spa is having a Selby Winery Dinner on March 24. What a perfect opportunity to find out why the wines are so sumptuous.
Selby Winery is the result of 11 years of hands-on labor by sole winemaker and chief executive, Susie Selby. Her vineyards are in Napa Valley and Sonoma.
Have a look at the menu they’ve set for this occasion. I think you’ll agree that they’re giving us gourmet dining and then some.
The reception begins at 6:30 p.m. with several canap & #233;s to savor with the Selby 2005 Rose of Syrah: crab-salted cod fritters, Kobe beef cheeseburger in puff pastry, shrimp Louis roll, artichoke salad, calamari poki and Sonoma foie gras BLT.
The actual meal begins with a first course of toro carpaccio and Carlsbad del Sol oyster with yuzu vinaigrette and Selby 2003 Sauvignon Blanc.
Four more food matchings follow, and that’s before dessert! Next is skate wing wrapped in banana leaf with Selby 2004 Chardonnay.
Segue to duck leg confit with maze gnocchi and cherry-chocolate mole sauce, accompanied by Selby 2003 Merlot. Cocoa-rolled rack of lamb is matched with Selby 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon.
Time for a lovely cheese course of Cypress Grove Humboldt Fog goat cheese (with sides of tomato-pistachio jam and bacon bread) along with Selby 2003 Dry Creek Zinfandel.
Dessert also sounds ultra impressive: Zinfandel poached pear, rosemary granite, wild strawberries and fromage blanc puff tart adorned with Scharffen Bergen chocolate bell, flourless biscuit and a dollop of chocolate fondant. The dessert wine is Selby 2002 Bobcat Zinfandel.
Cost is $95, plus tax and gratuity. Don’t forget the time and date: 6:30 p.m., March 24. For reservations, call (949) 234-3765 as this will surely be a sellout. St. Regis Resort is at One Monarch Beach Resort in Dana Point.
Fifi’s Cruise
This story is about doing a lot of varied dining, some of it amazingly fine due to the consultation of one of France’s three-star chefs, Georges Blanc, and doing all of it with lovely surroundings aboard a mega ship that provided a few days of fun activities for side orders.
Here’s the way it came about. Our two boys and our daughter-in-law, Kevin, Geoff and Heather, began wondering earlier this year what to do for me to celebrate a special birthday. First of all my birthday was on Feb. 14 and that’s one of the busiest days of the year for restaurants, so you are not likely to find us scrambling for a reservation in any year on that date.
I’m in enough high-end restaurants throughout the year anyway. I’m more inclined to a real down home place for fun and laughs like Watson’s Drug Store in Orange, where the diner food and service are terrific but all else is happily quite downscale.
I came up with what I thought, and what turned out to be, a perfect solution. My birthday gift would be the other way around: me giving my family time together on a little trip on a large ship. So, Patrick and I treated our kids and the two little grandkids,Ava, 5, and her little brother Max, 16-months-old, whomost of you know we adore and spend so much time with anyway,to a four-night cruise along the coast of Baja on the Carnival Cruise Lines’ ship Paradise.
Details
There are two cruises weekly aboard the Paradise. The ship departs and returns at the Port of Long Beach. One cruise departs on Friday evening and returns Monday morning. The other, which was our option, departs on Monday evening and returns on Friday morning.
It’s a given that since the ship sails only along the coast of Baja, land options only are Catalina and Ensenada. Not a fantastic itinerary for those of us spoiled by sails on top luxury liners to far away world ports in Asia and Europe. But this was delightful, for just plain fun aboard a very nicely appointed and very clean ship with stellar service, good shows, a spa and sufficient other amenities.
Patrick and I had been used to sailing on ships like those of Crystal Cruise Lines, Cunard, Silver Sea and such, all in the high luxury category. In divulging more secrets of my life, I have served as guest chef on five cruises for Crystal (two weeks duration each time): through the Norwegian fjords and the North Atlantic once, to islands of the Caribbean and parts of Mexico and Central America and Panama Canal crossings three times and one trip that began in Hong Kong and stopped in Japan, South Korea and China along the way.
Guest Chef
When I am serving as guest chef, I teach one cooking class per week that I am onboard,on a day at sea,and provide the cruise’s chef with some of my recipes to use on menus during my stay and beyond, as they wish. Great fun.
We took our first trip on a 2,600 passenger mega-fun ship, Carnival’s Conquest, two years ago this month. Several of us went to New Orleans and then on the week-long cruise across the Gulf of Mexico and into the Western Caribbean.
The Conquest is a remarkably beautiful ship and one could never surmise that there were that many guests because the public spaces are so many and so vast. It was a terrific time that left us with fond memories.
I was not looking for the luxury of the Conquest in booking on the Paradise, but it did well in impressing us with beautiful interiors, vast public spaces, a three-level atrium, generously stocked shops, casino, restaurants, coffee bars, lots of dancing and music venues. The nightly shows were engaging and appropriate for even little Ava, who stood up and danced, mimicking the entertainers on stage, one evening.
This ship, like all others, has hamburgers, pizzas, sandwiches and hot dogs served almost non-stop at some deck-side grill. It also has a very impressive and quite varied buffet for those who prefer dining more casually than in the luxuriously appointed dining rooms.
Nice Surprise
However, the big surprise was in the formal menus for lunch and dinner that were far beyond in taste and presentation than I’d expected.
In part, we can credit the world renowned master chef Georges Blanc for that. In signing a consulting agreement with Carnival Cruise Lines, he now integrates some of his signature dishes into the menus for the main dining rooms and specialty dining rooms on some ships (not all ships have additional specialty dining, which is the case with Paradise).
We had everything from fresh lobster, to perfection in steaks, roast pork that gave new meaning to taste treat, Italian dishes that seduced the palate, West Indian roasted pumpkin soup that I wish I could find here in OC, and so many other pleasing dishes.
It was far more special than expected, with dining rooms that were almost as deliciously appointed as the food we were served, excellent service and thoroughly amusing stories from our dinner waitress Kremena from Bulgaria.
Other memories will endure as well. We shall never forget little Max running madly around the top deck jogging track and down the stateroom corridor as fast as his little legs would take him, thinking it was all his personal running path, or trying to get the hang of dining with the whole family at the table every evening in the formal dining room, giggling every time he went in the glass elevators and trying to emulate everything his big sister did.
Ava, of course, is always a joy and we love to take her to diverse places for life experiences. She’s pretty familiar with dining in fine restaurants and loves eating in any restaurant.
There’s even a nice Camp Carnival place on board where children of most ages can go for a short stretch or a long one to watch appropriately selected movies and do art projects, all under the care of special personnel.
Even though this is a family-oriented ship, we never felt that there were too many children around.
Fun Facts
For fun facts about what it takes to run a ship this size, here are some figures they shared. There are 930 workers on board, 450 of which are involved in the food and beverage department.
There are four galleys preparing 14,000 meals a day,remember the early bird breakfasts and midnight buffets before and after the real day of meals.
There are 110 cooks and one executive chef, plus two sous chefs. All food is from the U.S. Each week, orders consist of 10,000 pounds of beef, 8,000 pounds of poultry, 6,000 pounds of fresh fish and shellfish, 12,500 pounds of produce and fruit and 1,000 gallons of ice cream.
We all know that eating too much on a cruise is de rigueur. This cruise was short enough though that not a lot of extra pounds were carted home around our waistlines. An extra trip to the spa here and there is helpful too.
The Paradise is one of the older ships, but completely in tune with all Carnival standards. One thing that I truly appreciated was the general cleanliness of cabins and corridors, not to mention the ultra comfy beds that were topics of conversation all over the ship. Lolling around in socks on the carpeted floors found not a hint of dirt on the bottoms of my white ones, meaning that they shampoo regularly.
