anna-lee and jesse do stuff: August 2010

It's Anna's last night in LA before her long work trip, so we decided to finally eat at Bottegga Louie. It's as pretty as everyone says and it's a must try restaurant if you live in LA. Sitting and eating, if you look out the window you feel like you are in NYC. It was a pretty good meal that was marred by some very poor service by our waitress(who started off so good)... oh well, we got macaroons so you can't be sad about that!!

Wheat beer and a mojito.

Super delish Margherita pizza. (we took most of this home)

Calamari - double delish!

Trenne. (not as good as the waiter said it would be, the fried pasta was like eating raw pasta. blech)

Cheese poof turnover dealie and rare rib-eye. We ordered this medium and in some parts it was basically blue. However our waitress never came back to the table after the food was served (she was in some sort of kitchen meeting but no excuse not to check up on your tables). Once the entrees were served our waitress' tip kept vanishing by the minute. Very poor service.

All of them please! Yums!

Two of each flavor.

A shot from an unpublished blog entry last week.

Expect to see more of this hat.

So we decided last minute to zip up to Las Vegas for a mini getaway before Anna has to travel for work (fashion week!!! yay!!). Since I've never been to Vegas it was the obvious choice. We drove as you can see.

Zzyzx road? Yeah.

See those mountains WAY in the distance... that's where Vegas is... and this is after driving for 3 hours. The last stretch was pretty long (and considering I miscalculated a pee break, a little painful)

We stayed at the Palms Place in a suite on the 34th floor. At the end of each hallway there were these floor to ceiling windows that were super scary to stand in front of. However not scary enough to stop me from posing like jackass in front of.

"Skytube"

Skytube again. Perhaps they shouldnt have named it "skytube"... it's this really long hallway with moving sidewalks but it's neither up in the sky or a tube. The pattern of the carpets and walking on those moving sidewalks makes you a little dizzy and tripped out. They should have called it "nausious corridor".

Rojo lounge. We scored a couple free drinks in here and the bartenders were really nice.

View from the balcony. I thought hotels in Vegas were supposed to have locked windows that prevented you from killing yourself after you lose all your money etc. Well we had a balcony, so I guess the palms place isn't really concerned with that. So that's the view of the other two Palms buildings and the strip behind it.

That pyramid with that light dealie.

Blurry room and vegas.

Anna got all dolled up(seriously how hot is she!) and I did my best to clean up and we went out for some food. Here's a little fact we didn't know about vegas. Want to eat something good after 11pm at night? Not a chance.. in fact most nice restaurants are closing down at 10:30ish. So we ended up having dinner at a little 24-7 cafeteria style place. haha. We then zipped up to the ghostbar on the 55th floor of the palms to watch some people seriously embarrass themselves. Kudos to the guy who picked us out of the crowd with a... "you're not from here" (thank god!)

Skytube! We spent half of our first day in Vegas in the skytube! woo! You can see at this point we're getting dizzy!

Brunch at Simon which looks out onto the pool where we watched everyone pretending to have a good time as torrential winds were blowing. Water was literally blowing out of the pool and any towel that was left unattended probably flew halfway to NYC. We smartly decided to skip the pool and got an amazing couples massage at drift spa. soooooooo relaxing!!!

So this is when I punched out the immortal joe louis.

I made this face every time I took a touristy picture like this just to make Anna laugh.

One of the many insanely huge shopping malls attached to the casinos.

Public art!!!

After seeing hundreds of people walking around with these I had to get one. It's a giant margarita (i got two extra shots of tequila in it - wise choice!) So I basically made a nuisance myself and made Anna take pictures of me looking like an ass.

I'm really regretting not buying that hat.

Asian tourist!!! We walked around the strip and checked out most of the casinos. Tons of fun. And even Anna couldn't resist the giant hilarious margarita.

We ended up in the Paris casino where a really cool dealer taught us how to play roulette properly.... and we won! In fact we came out ahead all weekend!

After walking forever and checking out all the restaurants we decided on the Mesa Grill... the food was TO DIE FOR. We started with the TIGER SHRIMP + ROASTED GARLIC CORN TAMALE Corn - Cilantro Sauce, I had the NEW MEXICAN SPICE RUBBED PORK TENDERLOIN Bourbon - Ancho Chile Sauce Sweet Potato Tamale + Crushed Pecan Butter, and Anna had the 22 OZ BONE IN CHIPOTLE GLAZED RIB-EYE Red + Green Chile Sauce with Roasted Corn with Grilled Cactus, Lime + Cotija. So much food we ended up taking it home and having it for dinner the next day in Los Angeles. The service was excellent, the food was beyond amazing and that was the best margarita I've ever had. (however considering what i was drinking earlier in the night...