Lamplight Lounge was one of the few in-park Disney restaurants that we wanted to try because we heard some decent things about. I was able to nab a reservation pretty easily for 2 for 7:00 PM on a Friday night. The food is similar to a gastropub, and in the winter if you get a late enough reservation, you can actually watch the water show from your counter without cramming onto the bridge or other busy viewpoints.

Napa Rose is located in Disney’s Grand California Adventure hotel and is known for its award-winning wine list and exemplary service. The food has a lot of inspirations from California’s fresh, farm-to-table qualities. This is arguably Disneyland’s premier restaurant that many, including some of my local family and friends, visit just for the food. I wanted to try this out to see how it compared to New York City.

Carthay Circle is located fairly close to the front of California Adventure. You do need an admission to the park in order to access this restaurant which is basically in the square at the end of the main road from the entrance. This was actually our second time visiting. I remember the first time being fairly underwhelming, so I felt it was wasteful to even spend the time to document it. This time around, my partner wanted to check this out again. As usual, you have to make sure you get reservations way ahead of arrival, or else there’s a sketchy wait time. For this, I lowered my expectations greatly, so let’s see how it went.

We’ve finally arrived in Los Angeles to kick it with family before heading up to Mammoth for a wedding.  This restaurant was suggested because it has modern Taiwanese American tastes to it that is seemingly becoming a trend in the Alhambra areas.  Unlike NYC, I’ve always felt LA had better Asian food in the low/mid price ranges, so let’s see how it tastes.  We were able to wait list on Yelp for about 5 minutes around 10:15 AM.

For this month, it was TRUFFLES. I’ve never eaten a full blown truffle set meal. At $250 a pop and 600 consecutive phone calls over a span of 2 hours, I was able to get this reservation. Coupled with wine pairing, the meal was superbly awesome.

Note for 2022 migration: this is an old post from my other defunct blog. This has 1 Michelin Star. I remember that after this dinner, I was getting tired of blogging all my Maude meals. I started to go to Maude solo monthly for a few more times, but they started to enforce solo dining restrictions where you can only come at the first serving which is too early for me.

This is my 5th visit to Maude in 6 months. I guess I have the pleasure of doing this because I don’t have many financial responsibilities. This month’s tasting features pears, and again it did not disappoint me. I love pears, and I was curious in seeing how the chef uses it in his dishes.

Note for 2022 migration: this is an old post from my other defunct blog. This has 1 Michelin Star.

This is the month for tomatoes. I generally love tomatoes. They can come in so many different sizes and textures, such that it makes it very tasty. I will say that the meal for me did not disappoint.

We ended up getting the wine pairing which was about $70 extra. According to my buddy, the wine pairing was excellent throughout the meal and complemented the foods very well. I’ll just take their word for it.

The feature for Maude this month is corn, and it was way more awesome compared to last month. I like corn a lot, so I went in with some expectations, and I wasn’t disappointed.

It really sucks to get reservations here. To get this particular reservation I called about 100 times in a given hour. If you look on my cell phone bill, you will see at least 60 5-second calls to them coupled with 40 some calls from a desk phone. But I did it, woot! Corn is in season, so you can expect bold sweet flavors.

This could very well be my last post for food for a few weeks. Doing a special restaurant each week is getting rather grueling right now. I’ve decided to soften the blow, so I’ll go to Maude each month for the remainder of the year.

This is #26 of 52 (or 26?) of my 2014 LA food expedition.

For this month, the special ingredient is berries. Like my rhubarb meal that I went to 2 months ago, I was expecting this to be similar in that every dish would have strong presence and usage of some berry. To be honest, I was slightly disappointed because it didn’t meet my (overly high?) expectations.

What was so interesting about Maude was how each month has a different ingredient theme. I like this approach. Not only can you choose what you want to eat, but it also is cool to not have to think about what to order since the entire menu is a tasting menu. This so far is probably my favorite upscale LA restaurant (possibly attributed to the star of this month … rhubarb).