Craft...

Last Saturday, completely out of the blue my husband said to me, "Baby, I am going to take you to a fancy dinner tonight, we are going to Craft!"  I was ecstatic!  What a sweet, romantic little surprise!  I am a huge fan of Bravo's Top Chef, and especially a fan of Tom Colicchio, the shows host, and have been wanting to visit his new LA post Craft since it opened in Century City last year.  We first sampled the chef's food at his NYC restaurant, Craft.  We loved it!  It is sort of an upscale steak house type place, where you order your protein, starch and vegetables all a la cart.  He serves the food in little roasting dishes, which is so much fun.  

When we were in Las Vegas last summer for the Michael Buble concert, which was held at the MGM Grand, we had dinner at Craft Las Vegas, also located in the MGM Grand.  I actually have pretty amazing photographic evidence of this evening... You see, right after we sat down, and woman came over and offered to take our picture, and we happily posed away... 

When she came back right before dessert, she handed us this:  

Which opened into this: 

Please notice the lion super-imposed into our photo, and the location/date stamp.  And this my friends, is why I LOVE Vegas!  HA!  So cheesy I can barely stand it!  I insisted we buy it, if for no other reason than I didn't want this just floating around if we didn't buy it. 

So we headed over to Century City to try Craft LA, I am sort of a Craft groupie at this point... 

The style and decor of the place were very similar to NY and LV, I guess, if it ain't broke...  

We had to wait a minute or two to be seated, so we sat in the bar and had a cocktail.  I was a little disappointed in their cocktail list.  One of my favorite things is the signature cocktail list, and this one was limited and strange.  They did have a list of flavored vodkas, so I tried blueberry with 7-Up.  The drink was tasty enough, but it was served in a tall clear glass with ice and a straw. Hmpf.  So plain.  I think a little sprig of mint, or some real blueberries would have been nice.  I suppose this might be a tad nit-picky, but oh well.  

When we were seated, we perused the menu and everything looked good!  Double edged sword.  I started with the endive, bacon and candied pecan salad, which was delicious!  The bitterness of the endive paired with the smoky bacon and sweet pecans was amazing.  I sort of could hear Tom Colicchio saying that was his intention, in my head.  S had a mixed green salad, which was equally yum.  We shared two entrees - the prawns and the roasted chicken.  For sides, we had pureed potatoes for moi, and fingerling potatoes for him.  So GOOD.  The portions were a little on the small side, but it was all so tasty!  

For dessert, we had caramel roasted apples with vanilla ice cream and coconut sorbet, which were both very good!

I have photos of the food - but stupid blogger is not allowing me to add them properly!  Does the photo uploading process of blogger annoy anyone else?  Is there something I am missing? It uploads them upside down, all at the top, and they are nearly impossible to move around the page.  I will leave you with this shot that the valet took... sorry that my husband's head is cut off...