Adventures in California Part I: Lunch at the Crow Bar

A couple weeks ago, our friends Mike and Brittany got married in Los Angeles. It was beautiful and so fitting of their personalities and just wonderful. And a blast!

Since we had some time in Newport before checking into our hotel in downtown LA, Steve's friend Dave took us to the Crow Bar.

It so did not disappoint. We were all pretty hungry (and thirsty!) by the time we got to the restaurant, so we ordered pretty quickly. The restaurant isn't very big and it filled up pretty quickly after we got there.

(Ignore Dave's arm in the photo - I'm still taking photos on my BlackBerry because I can't commit to a camera. Hey Dave! Thanks for letting us stay at your apartment!)

I could definitely see us putting back a few pints at this bar. It looked so comfy and relaxed and unassuming...

So since we were all hungry, we ordered almost right away (well, right after ordering drinks). We knew that we were eating at Wurstkuche later that night (a sausage place that was awesome), so Steve and I didn't want to eat anything too heavy. We decided to split a flatbread and duck fat fries, and Dave ordered the fish and chips (which looked really delicious).

The flatbread had roasted roma tomatoes, creamy burrata and fresh basil on it...

That disappeared pretty quickly. I need to remind myself that flatbreads are thin and not like pizza. But this was crispy and the tomato/burrata/basil combo - always a good choice - was really flavorful and fresh.

To counteract all that healthy, fresh food, we devoured these.

This was my first foray into duck fat fries, and I'm a total convert. They were rich and salty and perfectly crispy. All fries should be like that. AND...they were paired with a white truffle aioli. And some sweet red sauce...but we didn't really eat that.

The white truffle aioli was the star of the whole meal for me. Steve thought it was a little rich and wasn't as obsessed with it as I was.

It got its own picture.

Yum. YUM.

After the fries and the flatbread, we realized that we were still a liiiiittle bit hungry. So we ordered the macaroni and cheese bites. They were paired with a spicy tomato sauce and disappeared REALLY fast...so quickly that I only got one picture.

The only problem we ran into at lunch was that our server disappeared once we asked for the check...for a long time. They ran our credit cards wrong and we practically had to hunt down our server to get him to correct it.

That part aside, our lunch at Crow Bar was great, and I would definitely fly back to LA for those fries. Maybe an airline will conveniently offer a cross-country ticket special?