Co Co Sala, June

All right, well, I've got to admit this review is a little bit overdue. So I'm having a little trouble recollecting exactly what everyone ate. I mean, given the multiple chocolate martinis and chocolate mojitos or whatever they were, it's not exactly surprising. I jest, I jest, nobody had more than one. Also, I neglected to get pictures of the food. Still, I'll do the best I can.

Definitely, the mac and cheese with a slice of chocolate-covered bacon was good. Granted, a tough recipe to mess up, but still, it was pretty nice. People thought very highly of the lamb sliders, and for an appetizer the four-cheese fritters were quite tasty. I had the aztec cheese enchilada, although the risotto looked very interesting, too. What is it with me and risotto? But I had to go with the enchilada because it contained some amount of chocolate, whereas the risotto did not. The risotto did contain something called basil foam, though. Harumph, basil is basil, in foam, powder, or paste form, if you ask me. However, as you may be noting, honestly the chocolate content of a lot of the food wasn't that high or that noticeable. While their Malted Milk Martini was quite good and all enjoyed the Cojitos, the chipotle chocolate tomato cream sauce that came with the fritters wasn't really that noticeably chocolate-y, at least to me. Granted, I favor gross flavors the same as I favor gross motor skills, and subtle flavors are often lost on me (as a result of coating my food in Sriracha sauce for so many years). Which is not to say that eating there was unenjoyable; on the contrary, I think everyone enjoyed it. It's just that if you're expecting fantastic, exotic, perhaps even grotesque edible chocolate creations, it's not that dramatic. In fact, the chocolate aspect comes across as a bit gimmicky at times; for example, they describe Aventinus beer on their drinks list as a chocolate beer. Uh, sorry, no. Aventinus is a dark beer, a dunkelweizen, but it does not contain any chocolate, is not supposed to taste of chocolate, and is not marketed as such. So to label it as such on their menu is a bit of a stretch. Nay, let us be frank, a fraud and a blasphemy, vile and mendacious. Of course, on a less vituperative note, the desserts were really chocolate-y and really good, so what more can one ask? On an interesting point, though, our waitress did say that they had increased the size of the entrees in response to customer complaints. From what I saw, the entree sizes for our group were ok, although by no means large. If you are a 300 pound nose tackle, you might be disappointed, but if you are of normal size and not looking to gorge you should be fine. Given America's obesity epidemic, more restaurants should probably adopt this approach. But the larger point is that you can eat dinner there, although this is a boutique gourmet restaurant where the focus is more on quality than on quantity. If you examine the menu, you'll notice that the selection of food items is not that large. I'm glad that dinner is a viable option now because I feel like customers would want the option. It's a bit annoying to go somewhere for drinks and have to go somewhere else for dinner.