August in November

The one meal Leigh Anne and I were really looking forward to was at John Besh's Restaurant August. It was our "fancy" choice for the week so we put on our best and headed out for a night on the town. The W invited us to a preferred guest reception so we kicked off the night with a free cocktail before heading to Rande Gerber's Whiskey Bar for a not-so-free cocktail.


With 2 glasses of wine in our system we headed down the street to Restaurant August for our 8pm reservation. 


We felt the restaurant was too classy for iPhone pictures of our food so you'll have to deal with the not-so-descriptive descriptions below.

The restaurant serves an egg custard (in an eggshell) with caviar as a "Thank You for Dining with Us" to open the meal. Quite interesting, but not exactly my style. Leigh Anne, of course, was already in culinary heaven.


We started with a salad of heirloom beets, crab meat, cherry wood bacon, mizuna, and quail eggs with black-eyed pea croutons. Amazing!


Leigh Anne then had a Shrimp Bisque while I tried the famous hand-made potato gnocchi tossed with blue crab and perigold truffle. We first saw the gnocchi on Food Network's "Best Thing I Ever Ate" and I'll be honest, it was pretty close. Little pillows of potato pasta melting in my mouth.


Leigh and I each ended up ordering the prime filet of beef with oxtail marmalade, porcini mushrooms and smoked marrow for our entree. The marmalade was outstanding and the smoked marrow was housed inside a fo-bone made of potato (quite genius).


To cap off our evening Leigh Anne tasted the napoleon of nougatine with Valhrona chocolate bavarois and salted toffee ice-cream and I enjoyed the chocolate and peanut butter crunch with brown sugar ice cream. Not too sweet, not too salty, just about right on each dish. 


Our plan was to head to the casino after dinner, but after a 2-hour dining experience and 3 glasses of wine we went right to room 1825 and directly to sleep.


I'm sure Leigh will add to this later, but I wanted to get up what I could remember. Definitely a memorable day of eating though.