Casa Del Mar Food Tasting

Food tasting was a much more luxurious experience than I expected! Once again, going with CDM pays off. We ate in the lounge overlooking the ocean, received lovely service, and had a nice chat with the catering manager assigned to our wedding. We tasted a LOT of food, and the manager was kind enough to let me do some tasting customization like replacing salads and desserts with soups and entrees. We have way too many Chinese guests. Serving a plate of raw vegetables (in January!) would get me skinned. So I'll start with our favorites, and then just give you photos of the rest.

Woodland mushrooms on phyllo crisp, in a port reduction. It sounds boring, but it's very wintery and quite well executed. The sauce is thick and flavorful, the mushrooms are cooked through but still have some pop, and parts of the phyllo are crispy and parts are soaked in the rich sauce.

Dungeness crabcake. Very nice! I always have low expectations of hotel crabcake, especially ones made with Dungeness crabs, which are very mild in flavor. This crabcake had very little filling, and actually packed plenty of flavor. Slightly crisped on the outside, served with a few greens and a lightly lemony aioli, it was lovely.

Lobster bisque with tarragon croutons (right). This reminded me of lunch at Nordstrom Cafe in SF with LC. That was our nearby escape from work when we needed to take a long lunch and get away. One lobster bisque each, a cone of fries, and a pot of tea each. Always soothing. I highly recommend the Nordstrom Cafe lobster bisque! This version was just as nice. The butternut squash soup was too thick and grainy, and the tomato soup was slightly too tangy and will be out of season in January (ew, canned?). Don't ask me how I picked three orange soups. Let's just say it's almost Halloween, and not that I didn't use my brain.

Colorado rack of lamb. By leaps and bounds, my favorite entree. However, I do realize that a lot of people don't eat lamb so this might not be a great choice. Sigh. GRR! We'll see how our RSVPs look in terms of food preferences, but this was amazing. Forget comparing it with caterers and banquet kitchens, this was one of the largest, most well prepared pieces of lamb I've ever had.

Miso marinated cod. Delish! Yes, so delish a fork attacked a corner before we could get to it. Incredibly moist (read: boy was it a fatty fish), lightly marinated, with some nice spicy greens to cut the fat. I'm so glad I told the chef to go easy on the salt on all our dishes. Miso can totally overpower fish.

Muscovy duck breast. This was good. Don't get me wrong. It was very, very good. However, it was not excellent. And compared to Peking duck, I think it would suffer in most people's eyes. So it will probably get eliminated not on its own merits, but because we'll have a lot of guests who won't appreciate a Western style duck preparation. And if I were to get incredibly nit picky, I would say the skin could have been crisped more. The edges were a little fatty, and I would prefer for the fat to have been scraped off a little to allow the skin to crisp up more. But really, that's psychotic food critic Pei talking. Kudos on the asparagus on this dish. By far my favorite vegetable accompaniment.

Braised short ribs. Yum! It tastes like a homey pot roast. Which is why it's getting eliminated. As much as I love beef and pot roast, and as great as this rendition was, it's not a wedding dish to me. It's a little too heavy, unrefined, and uninteresting.

Sea bass. Nicely seared, but a tad dry in the middle. We prefered the miso cod because the fish was infused with a light flavor. the sea bass tasted bland in comparison, which was surprising because I usually love bass. I also know that J's and my mom both hate olives, so maybe we'll just skip this combination all together. And call me a b***h, but when I eat string beans I like for the long tail and accompanying chewy fiber to have been removed. Kind of like how celery should be ribbed. The beans were cooked very well though. They did a great job with all the vegetables, cooking them through with still a bit of crispness, and keeping all the bright colors.

Halibut. This was our least favorite fish dish. The fish was just uninteresting, and mixed beans and rice is something neither of us likes. Oh well.

And lastly, this was an appetizer of spinach risotto. Like the ribs, this is something I would love to eat on any given day, but that I would not serve to a hundred other people. It had a large amount of pungent cheese in it, as well as a tangy lemon kick. I don't think the older Chinese people can handle that much cheese.

So we have a lot of decisions to make, but this is definitely one of the more fun decisions. We're going to send the hotel a few menu options, see how the pricing on our "dream combos" would look, see what guests' RSVPs look like, and go from there.