Pazo

Last night, Steve and I took Dave and Nancy to Pazo Restaurant in Harbor East for dinner. With some very last minute help from my parents who watched the kids, we had an opportunity to enjoy dinner!

Pazo is another Cindy Wolfe restaurant, but it's theme is tapas, small plates of food instead of large courses. I love tapas because you can pick and choose and nibble and try a little bit of everything if you want. Similar to her star restaurant Charleston, her seafood dishes were more notable than her meat dishes. There is just something about her seafood dishes that are amazing!

The four of us shared a plate of mixed olives, a pugliese bread, a neopolitan pizza (one of the best pizzas outside of Italy, according to Dave), salmon tartar (this was outstanding), a veal empanada (this was outstanding), a butternut squash soup with a cayenne pepper and orange froth (interesting kick to that froth), brisket with mashed potatoes (serious butter in the potatoes!), scallops on butternut squash puree (this dish rocked!), lamb chops with raspberry puree (the lamb by itself was just average. then you dipped it in the raspberry puree and wow!), and dessert. Dessert consisted of a scoop of vanilla bean, coconut and mango ice cream (the coconut stole the show out of this trio), a small trio of chocolate desserts - a gnoche, a hazelnut torte, and a modified tiramisu (the gnoche was evilly delicious) - and a pear torte with banana brown butter. The pear torte turned out to be the crowd favorite. We had a nice bottle of wine, and good conversation.

We got home just in time for Elektra to go to bed. She wanted to stay up and hang out with everyone, but eventually she realized how tired she was and went to sleep in her crib. Meanwhile, DJ had gone to bed without a fuss, having had a ball with Yiayia and Papou. Unfortunately, however, he woke up when I went to bed and stayed up until after Steve came to bed. We had to convince him (again) that he needed to go back to sleep in the pack-n-play. By the time all that happened, that left me with less than 6 hours of sleep. At least he woke up this morning in a good mood. Hopefully he'll nap a long time for Steve this afternoon.

It was a really nice night, thanks to my parents for taking the stress off of us and let us go out on such last minute notice. :)