So dinner last night with girlfriends went down at Enoteca Vespaio on South Congress. It's the more casual bistro version (and cheaper version) of its next door neighbor, Vespaio. One of my friends had another friend in town and so four of us headed down to SoCo around 6:45. Even though it was a Tuesday it was emptier than I though it'd be. We got seated immediately and the restaurant only started to fill up when we were headed out around 8. It was a hard menu choice for us since everything sounded so delicious but we finally narrowed it down. My plan had been to order the spinach salad but I was kind of craving some nice hot pasta so my plans changed at the last minute. To begin I ordered a Caprese salad which was... heavenly. Everyone else commented that it was very simple and tasted kind of bland. But that's the beauty of it. The creamy, milky fresh mozzarella and the vine ripe red tomato slices and the beautiful green basil chiffonade only dressed with salt, good ground cracked pepper and extra virgin olive oil. Bliss.
Following that the four of us each ordered our own entrees. Amy and I planned on sharing both of ours since we couldn't decide on what we wanted. She ordered pasta with fontina-stuffed veal meatballs in a tomato sauce and I ordered a pizza with pancetta and caramelized onions.
The pasta was... it was just perfect. Very thin spaghetti perfectly al dente with a very hot thick tomato sauce with big chunks of tomato. It was so comforting and satisfying. The veal meatballs were juicy and tender, very well seasoned and the fontina cheese inside was gooey and delicious (one of my favorite cheeses, which is why I pushed for this dish, how can I turn away veal and fontina?). The dish came with a piece of garlic bread which I absolutely loved. It was crispy and buttery and super garlicky. Yum-o! After my salad, the garlic bread and some pasta I only ate one slice of my pizza (which ended up not being such a bad thing...)
The pizza, unlike the pasta, was disappointing. The caramelized onions were sweet and delicious but the good kind of stopped there. The crust under the pizza was very thin which I usually love but here it was soggy instead of slightly crispy (can't be too crispy either, that's bad also!). The pancetta and cheese made the pizza extremely oily. The flavor was good but the greasiness and the sogginess were just too bad to overlook. I wouldn't give up on the pizza here though because the crust around the edges was delicious and so perhaps it was just this pizza with it's high level of grease made the pizza soggy?
The place itself is very cute inside, quite small and intimate but very cute and comforting at the same time. If you want a great comforting pasta dish with a nice atmosphere, I definitely recommend this place.
After a little digestion we headed over to Halcyon. I had been there once before I really wanted to take the other girls there because I love the atmosphere and vibe of the place. We got there around 9 and, again, it was a Tuesday night so it wasn't exactly as happening as say on a Thursday of Friday night a little later, but there were quite a few people, all on the laptops for some reason? The real reason I wanted to take them there was for their s'mores! They bring you a little candle-fire thing (like what you would put under fondue kind of) along with chocolate, marshmallows and graham crackers and you make your own s'mores! For four of us they brough us 8 graham cracker sheets, 2 bars of Hershey's milk chocolate and maybe 10 marshmallows? Our flame went out right at the end and so she took our tray away to relight it and came back with another bar of chocolate, more graham crackers and more marshmallows! Apparently a co-worker didn't know she was just relighting our flame so she set up a new tray. S'more for for costs $9.
It's so fun to sit and do this with your friends (and of course it's delicious, you can't go wrong with s'mores). It makes for a really nice dessert and end to a great night. I also had some kahlua on the rocks... I had never tried Kahlua before, only Bailey's... I think I like Bailey's more, it's surprisingly less sweet, I thought Kahlua would be less sweet but alas it isn't. :)
Lunch today will be at Iron Works. And tomorrow before I head home Amy and I are going to eat lunch at Sandella's. I just got a coupon from them in the mail and it looks good so we're going to give it a try! That's a lot of eating out, huh? Oh well...
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