Days in Daytona

Well, I'm back from Daytona Beach. It was an absolutely lovely little weekend and I really enjoyed it there. I had visions of bikers and mullets and partiers dancing around my head, but was pleasantly surprised by the lack of those things. The beach was great, not very packed, and I had great restaurant/night life experience. The highlight of the weekend was definitely going to dinner at The Dish, which is tapas style. Luckily a lot of the menu was veganizable, so I was able to thoroughly stuff my face with a variety of tasty bites.

I started with a salad

I was kind of disappointed with the lack of toppings but the blueberry vinaigrette was fantastic; it had lots of whole blueberries in it. I didn't eat the croutons because they looked like they had cheese on them.


My first favorite of the night: gazpacho. This tasted vaguely like salsa but the flavor was awesome and it was super refreshing despite the spiciness. I want to recreate this at home (martini glass and all).


Fresh baked baguette and hummus. The hummus had an interesting spiciness to it and I'm not sure what they added to it but it was great.

After the appetizers, it was business time.


Fried cauliflower, portobello mushroom "pizza" and fire grilled vegetables over brown rice. The mushroom pizza was the best of the three, in my opinion. The mushroom had a great marinade, their sauce was wonderful and fresh basil is my favorite herb. It also came already cut into 4 "slices", which I found adorable.

The grilled veggies had an awesome soy based sauce that totally transformed the dish. Actually, one of The Dish's strong suits is that they're on point with their sauces. Every single sauce/dip we had was outstanding. The balsamic was the best I ever had (mushroom pizza tasted awesome dipped in it) and everything was simple but packed with flavor.


My second favorite of the night: sweet potato fries with warm cinnamon sugar. Yes, real sweet potato fries that aren't oven baked. Firstly, I love that they're crinkle cut. Secondly, it felt really good to nosh on some actual fries. I love me some baked sweet potatoes in any shape or form, but sometimes there's nothing like a fried fry. I ate most of these and would again any day.


Ratatouille. This (along with the fried cauliflower) was the only disappointment of the night. Don't get me wrong, it was good, but I wasn't blown away. I was expecting a hearty dish with big chunks of vegetables, but this was more like warm Italian seasoned gazpacho.


Three glasses of Cupcake Chardonnay were consumed, which took me from looking like this:


to this


T'was a fabulous time. Now, back to real life.