Date Night Recap: Dinner at Social and The Illusionists
I've been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks now. That's the problem with so much going on in the World of Joel I just have far too much to write about. One of the big reasons I hadn't written about this great date night was that I had a ton of blog posts already written and scheduled for the last couple of weeks. Once those caught up with me it gave me a great excuse to write a quick recap on an incredible date night.
As of writing this post we currently have 66 restaurants on Wunderlist that we've listed as "like to try." This is a list we started at the end of 2015 to get us to venture out and try new places. One of the ones both high on our lists was a place called Social. It's a restaurant in Costa Mesa that gets pretty good reviews on Yelp. We got there a little before 6PM and got a really nice table towards the back of the place. We just made it in time for happy hour (seconds to spare) and got two quick drinks and an appetizer. Jenn got a glass of wine and I mistakenly got a gimlet (I wanted a whisky sour). The bone marrow butter was insanely good, and Jenn's wine was good for the price.
For our entrees we decided to share two different plates. Our first course was a chicken and waffles. Both were outstanding. The chicken was popcorn style and had a nice spicy tangy sauce with it. The waffles though were out of this world. They were corn bread waffles (I love corn bread) and had an amazing syrup on top. We both loved this dish but I was going bananas over it. Our second plate was a pasta dish wish beef cheeks. Not sure I've ever had that before and it was really good although I thought the dish was a little to dense. We had to wait a long time for the second dish (they gave it to another table by accident) so they brought us over their brussels sprout appetizer free of charge. Neither of us are big brussels sprout fans but it was an interesting dish to try, but we would have never ordered it.
Because of the delay of the pasta we had to hustle from Social to Segerstrom to see the 7:30PM showing of The Illusionists. We first learned about this group when we were in Dubai. We saw a ton of advertisements for them on billboards on the freeway. We got to our seats (the same for all plays) and sat down for an hour and half of illusions. In comparison to when we saw If/Then, the crowd was not all that into the magic. There were a couple of tricks that had people murmuring but for the most part the crowd (including Jenn and I) were quietly entertained. For me it just didn't feel all that spectacular. When you have a nearly sold out theater you want the place to be humming. Sadly although we enjoyed The Illusionist it was not the memorable magic show we were hoping for.
