L’Opera Ristorante

The night of the BIS show we must have changed our dinner plans 20 times. At first my father and I had completely separate plans, but obviously that changed. Originally, I had found a good sounding steakhouse that excited me, but it ended up being filled with his competitors. Understandably, that isn’t the environment my dad wanted to spend his dinner in so we took a walk, literally. We passed restaurants until we could see L’Opera, and knowing my dad ALWAYS wants Italian we both walked right in.

I hate to admit it but I really enjoyed this restaurant. Italian fine dining is so common, and my parents use to eat it so much I am never excited to eat it anymore. Excitement or not this ended up being the best dinner I’ve had in a while. Every single thing we ate was so full of flavor that I walked away an extremely content customer.

It is so hard to resist ordering a beef carpacio when I see it on the menu. There is always so much flavor in those little bites. I always love it for how well it goes with red wine, and with that comes the next entry.

I hope I’m putting my commas in the right place when I try to say its name: Val di Suga, Angelini, Brunello di Montalcino 2001(sorry for the blur). It was a pretty tasty wine, enough that I am probably going to have a brunello of some sort this weekend just because I missed not having my favorite type of wine.

My dad went for veal chop as usual, and I don’t fault him for that. It tasted incredible, and the sauce has far far more flavor than I expected it to have by looking at it. It is a shame that the lighting was so poor that the veal and sauce kind of blend together.

My food brought the amazing. The white wine sauce didn’t look like much to when it was set down in front of me. In fact, when I was taking the picture I was a little bummed that my food was not gonna be flavorful. The moment I took a bite I completely changed my mind and was wowed by the flavor. The mashed potatoes tasted just as incredible in the sauce as the meat did. The best part though had to be that there was enough spinach to complement every bite.

Some sort of chocolate cake dessert with vanilla ice cream and bananas. It forgot to write down the name and sadly it didn’t survive a week in my tattered memory. I tried to look it up, but it’s not on the menu. I’ve failed you and I am sorry, but it was delicious and that’s what counts.

http://www.lopera.com/

Tags: beef, carpacio, chocolate, filet mignon, ice cream, italian, long beach, spinach, veal, wine