I found myself at Piora randomly on a Thursday night. Anoop lives in the area so I texted him on my way down town to ask him if he wanted to join. The invitation was completely selfish: two people can share more dishes than one! I mean, sorry Anoop, I wanted to catch up with you. My first time visiting Piora was with Amitha, and we had shared two pasta dishes, the trout, and didn't have any room for dessert. I was not making that same mistake this time!
I walked in around 8:30 and found two seats at the bar. Once Anoop arrived, we ordered our drinks. Anoop ordered a Havana Sour.
I ordered a glass of the Burgandy. This is growing to be one of my favorite types of red!
We deliberated over our menu options, and Anoop mentioned there is a 40 ounce cote de boeuf that is off the menu, and it has received all kinds of praise. I was worried that would be too much food, so we decided we would just order a couple of starters, a pasta dish, and a meat dish, and I would be careful to save room for dessert. As we were discussing our options, Kyle, the sommelier, told us that they may be switching menus soon and the cote de boeuf may not be available. Well, that was that - we were going with the cote de boeuf. And, of course, a side of monkey bread. You HAVE to order a side of the monkey bread. It is basically slathered in butter and served with two types of butter, a seaweed butter and a whipped lardo.
We were given the "carrots" starter. You might think carrots are boring, in fact, that reminds me of my yacht week abs diet days...but I assure you these carrots are fantastic.
Not as fantastic as the barbecued octopus! If you had to choose between the two, I would say go with this dish. It was very smokey, and probably the best octopus dish I've had to date!
A server brought out the full steak for us to look at before he sliced and served it to us. This is a 40 ounce steak, people. We were told a good portion of it "is the bone" part. Okay, mayyyybe.
We decided to order another glass of red wine - this time - something from Bourgueil. I'm not familiar with that region, but it went very well with our cote de boeuf. After we ordered we decided our new years resolutions would be to have fewer glasses of wine with dinner. Our dish was served with some olive oil potatoes. I probably wouldn't order this separately as a side, but it was a nice accompaniment to our steak.
I'm starting to worry that a medium rare steak is going to be one of the things I can't live without.
I was starting to get very full, so I waved my white flag and put my utensils down. Whatever I couldn't eat that night, I would have for tomorrow!
Somehow, I still had room for dessert. Actually, two desserts, that we shared. The first was a named "apple" and was served with egg nog ice cream.
The second was a chocolate tart served with raspberry gelato. Both were the perfect closers to a very heavy meal!
The only drawback is that the service was kind of slow. Buuuut, the food is worth the wait.
As for the leftover cote de boeuf? Well, the next evening, I melted some butter in a saute pan and heated it up for a few minutes on each side. It was still perfection!
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