Restaurant Review: Altopascio, Milan, Italy

Altopascio - dinner on June 25, 2017

For the next few posts, we now leave the US and head out to Europe. Right after Vegas, I flew back home just long enough to unpack, repack and head back out to the airport so I could catch my flight to Milan, Italy for a business trip. I arrived a day earlier because jet lag and I are not friends and I wanted time to acclimate to the local time zone.

Still water

I’ve been to Italy before but not Milan. It’s a very business-centric, Monday to Friday sort of city;I arrived Saturday night and ventured out Sunday so it was fairly quiet when I arrived. I spent most of the day walking around (okay, and napping because jet lag smacked me around) and ended up at a restaurant near my hotel for dinner. I’m not quite sure what the restaurant was actually called. It was Altopascio according to my check but I can't be sure. My Italian is almost non-existent. I speak gelato and that’s about it. (I did look it up later but the only reference to an Altopascio I could find in Milan was at a different address and according to yelp, had closed.)

Most of the restaurants I’ve seen in Milan and other Italian cities have primarily outdoor seating. At least the ones near my hotel did. Which is great because it made for good people watching. I passed by the opening of the restaurant, a server saw me and asked if I wanted a table, I said yes, she indicated a two-topper and I took a seat with a good view of watching people walk by.

Carbonara

I can’t be in Italy and not get pasta. It’s unthinkable. So I ordered pasta carbonara and it was delicious. Carbonara is often rich since it’s made with eggs and cream and this was no exception. But the ingredients were really fresh and the sauce was perfectly made. A bad carbonara is rich and heavy but very bland. This was a great carbonara and actually wasn’t too rich (or so I kept telling myself so I could keep eating it) and it definitely had flavor.

What I also like about dining in Europe is the restaurant portions aren’t too big. This one wasn’t too small either but just right, especially considering I had napped through lunch so I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. It left me with enough room to order dessert.

Now, with my Italian being almost nonexistent and I had turned off data roaming on my phone so I couldn’t look up what the dessert menu choices were, I took a chance that “Tentazione al Cioccolato” would be some sort of chocolate cake or at least something chocolate. Fortunately, I guessed correctly and I was served a piece of chocolate cake with some kind mousse and chocolate frosting. (After I got back to my hotel and logged onto the free wifi, I googled to find out the literal translation was Chocolate Temptation.)

When I took the first bite of cake, I almost regretted my choice. It must’ve just come out of the refrigerator and the first mouthfeel was of dry cake. Uh-oh. Fortunately, as in European people watching custom, I ate slowly and that gave the cake enough time to warm to outside air temperature (which was rather warm) and the cake righted itself to how it was meant to be eaten: soft cake, chilled mousse and creamy ganache frosting. I enjoyed the last bite more than the first. Still, for once, the entrée beat the dessert. That carbonara was quite excellent.

Restaurant Review: Holsteins Las Vegas, Nevada

Holsteins Shakes and Buns - dinner on June 22, 2017

But first....Milk Bar

One of our team dinners was at Holsteins Shakes and Bun at the Cosmopolitan, another behemoth hotel-casino next door to the Aria. You approach Holsteins from a mall and on their floor were other stores and eateries. One of them was Milk Bar. I’d never gone to a real Milk Bar but I have their recipe book and I’d tried the corn cookie via their mix from Williams Sonoma. I was a little early at the meeting spot (and my coworkers were a little late) so I had time to line up and buy a corn cookie from the outer Milk Bar stand. I know I’d had them from the mix but I wanted to see how the real thing tasted straight from a Milk Bar location.

We were about to have dinner and I’d just eaten the AlmondBrioche from Jean Philippe almost 2 hours before so I tucked the corn cookie away for later (side note: it was good but I think I prefer making it from the Milk Bar mix) and joined the rest of the team for dinner.

As you can surmise from the name, Holsteins is a burger place. It was fairly large and we had the back room entirely for our group. They accommodated us with a price fixe menu that was a subset of their regular menu. Our event coordinator had ordered the appetizers ahead of time but we each selected our entrees.

Tuna Tartare

Caesar Salad

I have a love/hate relationship with burger joints. I love burgers. But since I’m a very plain eater, I hate all the extra stuff that burger places put on their various burger offerings. Seriously, I’m just all about the burger, bun, maybe cheese and when I’m really letting my hair down, a leaf of lettuce. No condiments, no tomato, no onion, no mushrooms, no pickles; don’t touch my burger with that stuff. 

Nom Nom Burger

Holsteins wasn’t exactly a plain burger kind of place so I settled for the plainest burger I could find, the Nom Nom Burger, but hold the dressing. A normal person who would order the Nom Nom Burger would get a burger, cheese, potato chips (on the burger) and dressing. Dressing. Ugh. Why do that to a burger? So I had them hold the dressing and ended up with, as my coworker sitting next to me helpfully pointed out, “a cheeseburger with potato chips”. Why, yes. And that’s fine with me. 

I will admit it’s a little odd to bite into a nice, juicy cheeseburger and crunch into chips under the bun. I’m sure it was Holsteins’ way of not being a typical burger place. There were a lot more exotic combinations than my cheeseburger-with-chips. But that was fine because it was a good burger.

Vanilla Milkshake

They made even more excellent milkshakes. I rarely have milkshakes – I love them but I don’t love the calories so they’re a sometimes-treat, not an everyday thing. But I’m not in Vegas every day so…. Someone ordered a cookies and cream milkshake and holy cow (bad pun intended), when Holsteins does a cookies and cream milkshake, they really mean COOKIES and (ice) cream. The milkshake came with a jumbo-sized ice cream cookie sandwich on top of the milkshake. My eyes ate it up but I was happy to stick with my regular milkshake. I was full enough. Overall thumbs up for Holsteins – friendly atmosphere, good burgers, fabulous milkshakes.

Cookies and Cream Milkshake

Bakery Review: Jean Philippe Patisserie - Las Vegas

Jean Philippe Patisserie - visited June 21-23, 2017 at the Aria in Las Vegas, Nevada

This will be one of those heavy food porn posts. I’d rather let the pictures speak for themselves but I’ll throw in my random commentary. I had a teambuilding offsite in Vegas (awesome perk, yeah?) and as luck and my baking-magnet universe would have it, we stayed at the Aria. Where, upon checking in and as I headed towards the elevator bank to go to my room, I discovered, right at the foot of the elevators, that there was a Jean Philippe Patisserie.

You can bet I had done my homework before leaving for Vegas with “homework” being looking up which bakeries I can walk to on the Strip. I’ve been to Vegas multiple times so I wasn’t unfamiliar with the bakery landscape. I knew about Carlo’s and Bouchon and had gone to both before. But it was my first time staying at the Aria and having Jean Philippe Patisserie right there was like getting instant nourishment for my foodie soul.

They’re open 24 hours – hey, it’s Vegas – and although I had arrived later at night and had already had dinner before my flight, that didn’t stop me from visiting the patisserie within minutes of dumping my carry-on in my room. It was on the edge of the casino and was doing a brisk business. I had to take a ton of pictures since I was on sensory overload and capturing the images to enjoy later was my way of handling all that sugary input.

Well, sort of. I also had to queue up, drool over the display cases and narrow my choices to an agonizing list of 1. For the first visit anyway. I selected the Snickers Cake and almost didn’t blink at the outrageous $10 price tag for a mini cake. True, it was beautiful, they did box it up and give me one of the classiest carrier bags I’ve ever seen to transport it the short distance of 24 flights back up to my room. Reminder to self: it’s Vegas and Vegas is expensive.

Snickers Cake

The cake was freaking delicious. It was layers of chocolate cake, chocolate mousse, ganache, something crunchy, a thin layer of caramel and just bites of perfection. And I’m not even big on peanut stuff. If I had to pay $10 for a little cake, it was worth every bite and calorie I consumed at almost midnight. Goodbye, diet. See you after Vegas.

That first trip did set me up for some “long-range” planning. In my-speak, that means I planned ahead to what I wanted to try for my remaining brief time in Vegas. We had team dinners I had to work around so I couldn’t actually camp out at the patisserie during my entire stay. Not that I didn’t briefly toy with the idea. Plus I had to work the calories in somehow. Which turned out to be easier than I thought since the Aria conveniently offered a nice gym which I utilized the next morning by banging out 7 miles on the treadmill. It was triple digit temps outside so no way was I running outdoors in that desert heat.

But the 7-mile run emboldened me to choose the Nutella Beignet for my breakfast that morning. Here’s the funny thing about running. I can’t eat before I run; my stomach can’t handle it. And even though I burn a ton of calories during the run, I can’t eat right after a run either. I’m just not hungry. An hour later though, I’m ready to chew off my right leg. The Nutella beignet went down easy after that hour although I have to correct the name and call it a doughnut rather than a beignet. I’ve had beignets at no less an august venue than Café du Monde and this wasn’t a beignet. It was a doughnut. It was delicious but a doughnut nonetheless.

Nutella Beignet

I had aspirations to sample more delicious goodness from Jean Philippe Patisserie but alas, I hadn’t factored in how much heat really does suppress the appetite, even mine, and a day spent outside at the pool cabana where the team was pretty much killed my sweet tooth. So effectively that, despite my 7-mile run, I wasn’t even hungry for lunch and didn’t eat again until 4 pm that day.

At that point, our team dinner wasn’t for another couple of hours so I did indulge in another Jean Philippe purchase to tide me over. This time was an almond brioche. I’ve had brioche before too but this one they did a little differently. Instead of a whole brioche roll, this seemed more like a round brioche loaf that was cut into a slice, layered with almond paste and sliced almonds. Whatever they did to it, it was also freaking delicious. Soft bread, sweet almond paste, crunchy sliced almonds – amazing. It also had the benefit of being cheaper than the Snickers Cake. This one clocked in at $5.

Almond Brioche

There’s also a Jean Philippe Patisserie at the Bellagio which is where some of my coworkers and I did end up as part of the scavenger hunt after dinner that night. We were supposed to hunt for the “world’s largest chocolate fountain”. Took us awhile to find it, even with the help of google and our iphones, but mostly because the Bellagio is so Vegas-Strip huge that we had to cover a lot of ground to end up in that part of the Bellagio.

I don’t know what I was visualizing when I thought of the world’s large chocolate fountain but it wasn’t what I expected. Maybe I had been hoping more for a pure waterfall of chocolate a la Niagara Falls in gushing streams of liquid warm chocolate. Hey, I can dream. Instead, it was a bunch of small pools of various types of chocolate in an elaborate structure that connected to each other but the chocolate flowed quite sedately. Huh. Oh well, at least I can say I got to see it.

I had good intentions of making one final stop at Jean Philippe Patisserie on my last morning before leaving for the airport since it was literally on my way to checkout at the lobby. I wanted to try the Nutella Brioche. Or the sticky bun. Or a scrumptious-looking muffin. Even perhaps get something for breakfast there then a snack later at the airport. Alas, when the time came, I just wasn’t hungry. I know, who am I, right? But the triple digit heat was still doing a fine job of suppressing my appetite plus I’d had a big dinner the night before (next post). So I missed a third opportunity to indulge in Jean Philippe’s offerings. Bummer. Next time, Vegas, next time.