Still #1

After learning that I won a prestigious scholarship, I wanted to celebrate with Cashew. And what better place to go than our favorite restaurant in Atlanta? So it was time for our second visit to Pura Vida!

In the spirit of a real celebration, we started off the night with drinks. The caipirinha attracted my attention because it's made with limes and I love sour, lime-containing drinks. As expected, it was amazing. Cashew got the signature Pura Vida cocktail. The name skips my mind right now, but I think it was "Sex with Santiago." We had gotten a free sample from it after flirting with the bartender during our first visit there, so now she wanted the full version. Something you'd never guess from the menu or even by drinking it is that it contains a raw egg! Cashew and I know just because we're best buds with the bartender ;) The drink is great, not slimy at all. By the way, both drinks had just the right amount of alcohol.

For food, we wanted to further explore the exhaustive menu and try things we didn't get the first time. It was hard to pass some of our favorites, but we came up with five new options: Peruvian blue tilapia crudo, charred mushrooms, fall over chayote, mofongo con "carne frita," and chivo al vino en fufu. The tilapia was lightly cured and salty. I didn't mind the saltiness, and I don't think it was overwhelming. I think, despite being cured, the fish tasted really fresh. Just like some of the other dishes we got that night, it came with foam on top. After watching Food Network obsessively, I know that foam is actually really hard to make, and is one of the biggest trends in the food industry right now. I'm glad to see that Chef Santiago is up to date with what's cool in the culinary world :)

We got the charred mushrooms despite the fact that I didn't even like mushrooms up until a few months ago. Well, dishes like this one made me like them. The mushrooms seemed more like sauteed in butter than charred. Whatever the preparation method, they had an amazing taste and simply melted in your mouth. If all mushrooms tasted like that, I doubt I would have avoided them. [Note to Pumpkin: they taste like the mushrooms my mom made once.]

The reason we ordered the chayote was because we didn't know what half the ingredients were :P It was a chance to try something different. It is basically a salad made of a type of squash with tofu on the side, pepitas (pumpkin-like seeds), and calabaza puree (whatever calabaza is...). The dressing was umeboshi sauce (whatever umeboshi is...). The salad reminds of Vietnamese salads in style, but was a bit too sour. By the way, the tofu was cooked perfectly, and was much better than the famed tofu at Top Flr which was one of the 100 dishes to try in Atlanta.

Speaking of the 100 dishes to eat in Atlanta, the mofongo was on the list as well! I think mofongo is basically mashed up bananas that have been formed into balls and fried. Honestly, I don't remember much what they tasted like. I had really high hopes for this dish, but I was disappointed. The mofongo was unmemorable. On the bright side, it also had foam, and the pork was really really tender and flavorful.

Finally, the chivo dish was a type of giant dumpling. The Chef again showed off his creativity by fusing Italian (the polenta), French (slow-cooked meat in wine, here goat) and Asian (the dumpling) elements. Just like the pork before, the goat was perfectly cooked and was extremely tender. In case you've never had goat meat before, it tends to be tough and needs special preparations to tenderize it. I was very impressed with how it turned out in this dish.

So after trying 11 different dishes on two different occasions at Pura Vida, I'm glad to say that I still consider it the best restaurant in Atlanta. And the good news is, there are more items on the menu I need to try!

Expensive, but delicious!

I love getting deals on good food, so I go to Scoutmob restaurants all the time. That's exactly what I thought I was doing last night when Cashew and I went to Pura Vida. It is a tapas restaurant in the Highlands, and it's owned by Chef Hector Santiago who appeared on Top Chef. I think this is the first Top Chef restaurant I have been to... I was prepared for really good food, but what we got completely blew away my mind!

But there will be more about that later. First, the only spoiler of the night was the check. As I said, Cashew and I thought we would get 50% off our dinner. However, as it turned out, a restaurant called Pure Taqueria had the deal, not Pura Vida... At the end we had to pay about $40 EACH!!! Good thing we both agreed this was the best food we had ever had, so we weren't very upset. And I mean it, the food at Pura Vida is probably the most creative and best tasting of anything I have ever tasted.

Enough of this, though, I need to get to what we ordered. I ordered a white wine sangria as my drink. It was pretty good. When I got to the bottom of it, I noticed that it had grapefruit. I hate grapefruit, but somehow I didn't notice its taste in the sangria :)

We shared 5 different tapas: (1) tuna poke, porque no?, (2) cangrejo "tater tots," (3) aguacate criollo, (4) tamales nejos, and (5) steamed coconut buns. First came the aguacate criollo, or avocado with chorizo chips. I couldn't stop my praises for the dish after the very first bite! It's so creative and innovative and delicious :) I need to learn how to make this myself!

Next we got the tuna poke. Not much to say about it except that the fish was soooo tender, it melted in your mouth. The tuna was covered with what looked like regular corn flakes, but oh well... One sub par ingredient wasn't enough to take away anything from this amazing dish.

The next dish we tried was the coconut buns. The buns themselves were very very soft and light and airy. I personally didn't taste any coconut flavor, but I still loved them. They were wrapped around a piece of pork belly. I am known to pick every piece of fat from my food because I don't like the texture of fat. Again, I was amazed at how well-prepared the pork belly at Pura Vida was. I could actually eat it by itself, without having any of the bun in the bite. So when a chef can transform fat into something delectable, you know you're at an amazing place.

The next dish was one of the tapas we were most excited - crab tater tots. The tater tots themselves were made of plantains, and they had pieces of real crab meat in them. The crab flavor was just strond enough to make it noticeable but not take away from the fried flavor and texture of the tater tots. By the way, I wouldn't have guessed they were made of plantains and not real potatoes. As everything else so far, they were delicious.

The final tapas dish was the tamales. They were also very tasty, and could be the best tasting thing at many restaurants. However, compared to the perfection of flavor in everything else we had had up to that point, they didn't quite measure up. The tamales themselves weren't very flavorful, but they went well dipped into the sauce that came with the plate.

Because everything was so impressive, we couldn't leave the restaurant without trying a dessert, too. Our first choice was the Latino chocolate tart. Unfortunately, they were out of it. So, we had to "settle" for the chocolate creme brulee. I don't know how good the tart could have been, but the creme brulee was our of this world. It was so dense and rich, it felt like chocolate pudding. However, it had the nice brulee crust on the top that's so much fun to dig into :) One slight negative with this dessert was the amount of powdered sugar on top. Both Cashew and I started coughing at our first bites. However, once we got to the Kahlua on the bottom, we had forgotten we had any complaints about the dessert.

In summary, I don't remember the last time I loved anything I ate so much. I did enjoy the food in places like Two Urban Licks and Rathbun's, but i don't think it can measure up to the culinary excellence we experienced in Pura Vida. Pura Vida is hands down my favorite place in Atlanta so far, and I am definitely going back there despite the hefty price :)