Let It Snow and Mercato at Four Seasons Westlake

December 9, 2015 by 1 Comment

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For a luxurious holiday getaway, look no further than the Four Seasons Westlake Village. If you stay there on Friday or Saturday night over the next few weekends, your family can enjoy its Winter Wonderland, as well as a gourmet Italian buffet dinner and dessert at Mercato, the market-style dining experience.

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Let It Snow has turned into a wonderland of winter-themed activities for families. Once you go through the portal to Let It Snow, Olaf and the Minions greet you for a photo op! Then follow the signs to the fun activity stations set up along the Look Out outdoor bar area:

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Holiday train rides
Hot chocolate and coffee station
S’mores at the fire pit (helpful elves are standing by)
Santa’s house – visit Santa, take a pic, and get a candy cane
Cookie decorating with Mrs. Claus
Pizza, adult beverages, and snacks for purchase
Ice skating!

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There is a small ice skating rink set up downstairs just outside the indoor pool. It’s a fascinating construction – made with fiberglass panels, skaters glide along on the skates provided and when they fall (because they will, let’s be honest) there is no cold ice to hurt or freeze them! My kids loved this and wanted to go back for more after dinner! Plan your visit well, because this is a popular activity, but staff keeps the line moving with skater time limits so everyone gets a turn.

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The activities make for a fun evening, and the icing on top is the festive sprinkle of snow that happens about every 15 minutes.

Let It Snow tickets are available to overnight guests who purchase the Winter Wonderland package. But Mercato Italiano, the bustling Italian evening in the hotels lobby restaurant, is open to anyone.

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At this buffet, we enjoyed the top-notch customer service we can always expect from the Four Seasons. We started with drinks – a Paso Creek merlot for me, and a Ladyface Alehouse dark amber for my husband. The kids loved their lemonade and chocolate milk served in “fancy glasses.” Warm bread is served with Ojai Olive Oil and balsamic vinegar, another local favorite.

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Servers recommended that we start with the antipasto side of the buffet, which actually turned out to be my favorite. The marinated mushrooms and artichoke salad, and the bruschetta, were good enough to bring me back for seconds, even after I had tried the entrees! Then we moved on to pasta, which was the kids’ favorite (of course), and I liked that there was a gluten free penne to try.

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The star of the entree section, for my husband, was the seafood cioppino, with mussels, clams, shrimp and crab. For me it was the lasagna. For the kids, well, it was making pizza with Chef Jim!

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For dessert, gelato flavors included pumpkin cheesecake and toffee crunch to pair with delicious custards and pastries. You’ll have to make sure to leave room though. It’s easy to indulge here! Reservations are wise, and cost is $31-50 per person.

My family enjoyed Let It Snow as guests, along with complimentary dining at Mercato Italiano, to facilitate this feature. All opinions are my own. And my husband’s and children’s.

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Raya at the Ritz-Carltzon, Laguna Niguel

May 24, 2014 by 11 Comments

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View from our table. If you need me, I’ll be right here. At least in my imagination.

Perhaps the most delicious thing I have ever eaten in my entire life was served to me this spring at Raya.

I am only 42 years old, and for most of my life I consumed bland, processed American style foods. It is only within the last ten years that I have branched out a bit and tasted more adventurous flavors. I do this especially when hosted by restaurants, as I was on this occasion at Raya. After all, I figure, these people have gone to great lengths to impress me. I might as well pay them the compliment of tasting their preparations, even if the ingredients are items that I might have shied away from otherwise.

And so it was that on my first trip to Raya several years ago I tasted octopus carpaccio. That dish, I’m afraid to say, was not among the top ten tastes of my life, although it was spectacularly presented and my husband, a seafood lover, was quite impressed.

No, on this evening with my dear friend Melanie (whose tastes are more refined than my own) early last month, at a sunset-side table perched above the Pacific Ocean, tended to by the world’s nicest server and chef, I practically licked clean a bowl of lobster bisque poured over a 63-degree egg, whipped avocado, and spongy cubes of queso fresco.

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I do like lobster bisque, but this was unusual, intriguing, and induced groans of delight in both of us. I had not known about the 63-degree egg, that it is a thing in restaurants now like pork belly was a thing year or so ago. It doesn’t matter what thing is en vogue, for me. I just like what I like when I like it.

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This is Melanie. She is very happy. I’m making the same face behind the camera.

And everything our server set before us was something I liked, starting with a crisp white wine to toast the sunset, a basket of fresh gluten-free Brazilian cheese bread rolls, spongy delights of airy dough served with goat butter, ricotta spread, and tomato jam. Sea bass and ahi tuna ceviche served with plantain & yuca chips. Rock shrimp quesadillas with whipped avocado aioli and a thick marinara-like salsa.

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Sea scallops with pork belly in a pool of sweet creamy polenta with perfect little sprigs of cilantro, snap peas, and heirloom grape tomatoes that taste like spring itself. (These were favorites over the mushroom huarache, whose ingredients were all so very promising, but the combo came up short of its table-mates.)

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And because our server knew it would be a mistake for us to have never tasted Raya’s truffle manchego fries, she brought us an entire basket. “Oh well,” we sighed, “it is our job to make room for these, isn’t it?” Somehow we found it, and we were very happy we did. Truffle is a taste I reserve for indulgent moments. Come to think of it, so are French fries. Together, with Raya’s homemade chipotle aioli, they make a most satisfying indulgence indeed.

And then, dessert.

Many superlatives came out of our mouths that evening about the things we put into them, and a lot of those happened during dessert. The California Citrus Torte is served with strawberry margarita sorbet (my favorite dessert flavor among all of this), a thin white chocolate wafer, Veuve Cliquot jello cubes (what?!), lemon grass, and a sprinkle of what looked like white chocolate chips at first but were made out of malted milk.

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We also sampled (um, and devoured completely) the sorbet trio: raspberry, passion fruit, and coconut. All three were fresh and delicious and tasted like the embodiment of their names.

Raya delivers the style, service, and taste you would expect from a dinner inside a Ritz-Carlton. If you go out to a fancy dinner only once every few years, do it here. It is an experience you will not forget.

Raya at the Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel
One Ritz-Carlton Drive
Dana Point, CA 92629
(949) 240-2000
Website and menu

 

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Four Seasons’ Lobby Lounge Says “Delicious” in Italian

January 9, 2013 by 13 Comments

For a special occasion, you could do a Sunday brunch.  To get authentic Italian food, you could go to an Italian restaurant.  Or even Italy.

But why bother with any of those things?  Right here in Westlake Village, the Four Seasons Hotel’s Lobby Lounge creates an Italian marketplace every Saturday night.  To encourage you to try everything on offer at their weekly Mercato Italiano, they offer a prix fixe menu and a varied and colorful array of different foods.

A marketplace buffet is laid out in a square in the middle of the Lobby Lounge, complete with umbrellas even though you’re all inside.  Along one edge is the salumi bar, where the chef puts the plates together and calls out “SALUMI!” when a plate is ready.  The salamis and pungent cheeses are brought to your table on slate slabs.  You can nosh on this while you nibble on the fresh bread served in little paper bags.

Continue along the right side of the square through the salads and antipasto bowls full of fresh market vegetables and freshly made pastas, to the bruschetta bar, where a server makes your bruschetta from scratch for you.

 

 

Take a left after the bruschetta to the pasta bar, which is reminiscent of an omelette bar at a brunch, except this is way better.  Any kind of pasta you want with your choice of toppings and sauces.  The butternut squash risotto was just the right combination of flavors, and used squash grown on the premises for the California Health and Longevity Institute.

And look at the wonder on my child’s face as he orders and receives that most wonderful of childhood delicacies…

…plain pasta with butter and parmesan cheese.  Look how happy!

Along the fourth edge of the square are the prepared entrees – you serve yourself here buffet-style.  A piping hot lasagna Bolognese, a tender pork loin dish, salmon nestled in pillowy mountains of garlic mashed potatoes, and lamb osso buco – something I had never tried before but looked so delicious I had to taste, and it indeed tasted just as good.  Come hungry to this meal, friends, because you’re going to want to taste everything.

The atmosphere of the evening is lively with Italian music playing loudly on the speakers, giving kids license to be their noisy selves.  Seatings are at 5pm and 7pm, so there is the early option for families with little ones.  Our kids enjoyed the bread and pasta and one of them even ate from the salumi plate, but the best part of the night for them was making pizzas with Chef Manny.

Along with salumi plates, bread, and beverages, the pizzas are brought to the table, and Chef Manny shouts the names of the pizzas as they leave his prep station so that the servers will come get the pie, walk it outside to the wood-fired oven, and return with a plate of delicious pizza.

This handcrafted artisan pizza has garlic aioli instead of tomato sauce, and is topped with butternut squash, spinach, and goat cheese.  Since our son made it, the taste was even more wonderful.  Of course, by the time it was done, the adults were filled with all of the other treats, and we still had to save room for dessert:

The gelato cart was serving up a variety of flavors.  We tried peanut butter and jelly, salted caramel, and pumpkin.  The PB&J was the grown-up favorite, while good old chocolate was a tried and true hit with the kids.  We also sampled the tiramisu (perfect) and one of each of the fancy tarts.  See that tray of shot glasses toward the middle of the bottom of the photo above?  Those glasses hold vanilla custard served in eggshells topped with tiny diced strawberries.

I was so delighted by the presentation that I forgot to get a close-up before I gobbled it down.

Also with dessert I tasted the special authentic limoncello that restaurant manager Massimo Cibelli told me is made from lemons grafted from Sorrento in Italy.  They are grown in Ventura, where the limoncello is made.  Served chilled, alone it is tart and powerful.  Poured over ice and mixed with sparkling wine, it would be a perfect dessert cocktail to sip by the pool in the summer.  Alas.

On this night it was snowing outside the Lobby Lounge.  It was manufactured snow, but it was snow nonetheless.  We shall have to return on a warmer evening and test my theory.

Executive Chef Mario Alcocer (below, left) conceived Mercato Italiano as a one-time special event, but it was so popular that the feature is now weekly with no end in sight.  The restaurant fills both seatings regularly, so reservations are recommended.

Not Italian, but very good with his delizioso.

Mercato Italiano happens every Saturday evening starting at 5:00 pm.  Prices are $45 for adults and $25 for children.  My family and I were guests of the hotel at this meal to facilitate this feature.

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