I have a lot to say about this restaurant and it is going to be in two parts. Both covered in this post. So keep reading because it's good. I was super excited ever since I booked this restaurant because their menu was so intriguing and it was an experience we had never had before.

Pardon the cell phone pictures, I didnt bring our big fancy camera in or my point and shoot but looking back..I should have had my point and shoot with me. Smh. Darn.

So first - I won a $100 Open Table gift card back in January at CES from Google.  We tried to use it for the Habana restaurant at the Irvine Spectrum Center for an early Valentine dinner celebration but it turns out I had to register the gift card on a certain website. Not just opentable.com but opentable.com/===something=== Why do I have to go to a special website to use a gift card from Open Table? I dont get that. Why not just go to the main website, enter the code and go from there? We did inform our waitress of the gift card we had and she had not seen it before so she kept coming and going from our table to try and talk to her boss about the situation. I had made a reservation the correct way this time and we just wanted to be super sure we could use the gift card and not be charged at the end of what could (and would) be an expensive meal. 

We will come back to the gift card situation later.

Our reservation was for 8. We ended up leaving the zoo about 5:30, it closed at 6. We figured we could go early and see if they had room to let us in. They did not so we went to Trader Joe's, hung out in the car, Tony called his mom...we kept busy until shortly before 8.

We didn't have to wait too long to be seated, thank goodness, and our waitress was really nice. She explained how everything would work for doing meal option we had chosen and how long to cook our food for. Yep - people pay a lot of money to eat out and cook their own food apparently.  Who knew?

Our waitress didn't seem correct on all the cooking times, she said we had to leave the broccoli on for quite awhile so we did which resulted in it burning and most of it was inedible which was super disappointing but I ate what I could. The edamame was not salted but it was good and one of the appetizers I could choose from. I also like my meats more well done and when we took them off the cooking plate the first time, the meat was definitely too red for my liking.

Sad day for the broccoli. 

Mushrooms for me and meats for us!

We got to choose from various meats, I let Tony do most of the choosing. We tried duck. I wanted filet mignon and so we got that too. There were a couple we could only order 1 per person but the rest of the meats were unlimited.  It was quite a lot of meat for me and I was glad I had other things on the table to eat to mix it up a bit. The meal is supposed to take 90 minutes but sometimes things don't come out very quickly and lucky for us our waitress was lenient with that time and let us stay extra. I'd say we left at 10:30pm. We got seated by 8:15 and we were ready to order food at 8:30pm. Good thing we were not in a rush to get anywhere but the hotel! We had wanted to soak in the hot tub but since we got there after 11, we called it a night.

I just LOVED the taste of these garlic noodles. Garlic is not one of my go-to foods usually but somehow..this just tasted amazing. My mouth still waters for it.

Next, time for some sweet treats!

Too many yummy treats. I dont know how we fit more in after all that meat and other food!

We ended the night with macaroons filled with ice cream and s'mores. Lemon, chocolate chip and vanilla mallows. Tony roasted the mallows because he is good at that and not catching them on fire and I put the s'mores together. 

Happy anniversary my love, there is no one I'd rather celebrate 7 years of marriage and 10 years of knowing!

So...'ended the night' is being used loosely here. It came time to pay and we handed over the gift card again. It took quite awhile of waiting for them to figure out how to use it. Why are they signed up with Open Table if they don't know how to use the gift card someone brings in? That particular waitress didn't know and I guess the owner/manager was being pulled in a lot of different directions. This resulted in us getting another round of macaroons and we asked for a couple extra marshmallows just to have. There was a QR code in my email from Open Table but the restaurant did not have any way to scan it they said. It was all very strange and took such a long time to get resolved but in the end it all worked out. Phew!