FLIP + CHING

Hideaway Steakhouse

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Ching under Food and Drink.

Pictures from our dinner at Hideaway Steakhouse in Westminster.

This is their menu. Prices are kind of high and your bill will add up since the items are a la carte. Lucky for us, Avaya picked up the tab.

Darcy and I shared a crab cakes appetizer. Their crab cakes are decent, but not great. I still think that the crab cakes I ate at Skipper’s Dock were better.

This is the escargot, which I didn’t try, but everyone else said it was very good.

The roasted portabella mushrooms above were very good. That, I can attest to.

I skipped the fresh oysters also. Oysters just don’t appeal to me.

Several people ordered salads to go with their meal. This is the iceberg wedge. I decided to skip the salad because I had my fill of the appetizers and was already worried that I wouldn’t be able to finish my entree.

If I were inclined to order a salad I would have probably picked the same thing. The other choices were Caesar, spinach salad (with fresh seedless watermelon, toasted pistachios, Bermuda onions, haystack mountain goat cheese, and honey balsamic vinaigrette), tomato caprese (with artisan greens, beefsteak tomatoes, fresh basil, fresh mozzarella, extra virgin olive oil, and aged balsamic vinegar), and house salad. Although, the spinach salad sounds pretty good too.

Darcy ordered the scallops for her dinner, which she said was very good, though not quite as good as the ones she had in Seattle when she and Ginger were there for the ICMI conference the previous week.

Jay, one of the Avaya reps, got lobster. It was huge!

Ginger got a filet mignon.

I got the fish special, an orange roughy. It’s a white fish like tilapia and the texture is very similar. Except, I think orange roughy is a bigger fish so the filets are bigger and meatier. It was good, though I have a feeling they serve this better at Bonefish Grill. I will have to try their orange roughy there for comparison.

These were five of us from my work and I think five reps from Avaya at dinner but these were all the pictures that I took. I didn’t want to get up and go around the table to take pictures of everyone’s food. They were already picking on me as it were.

I really, really wanted to get a picture of the prime rib because everyone on FourSquare said that was the thing to order. No one in our group ordered it though. However, Jay said that he’s had it before and it is pretty good. Oh, well.

The food at Hideaway doesn’t photograph that well, though. For such an expensive restaurant, their food presentation is a little on the sloppy side. The taste of the food makes up for it some but, when you’re paying that much for dinner, you kind of expect perfection.

Overall I think Hideaway is pretty good. We had good food and good service. However, when you factor in the price you’re paying and consider it with the quality of the food, there’s really other places to eat that probably would be better.

The atmosphere is nice, though. I imagine that’s one of the reasons why it seems to be popular with corporate types. I had a good meal and enjoyed a wonderful dinner with my colleagues. As for simple people like Brian and me, if it were just the two of us dining, this probably isn’t our kind of dinner joint.

Comment on This

Denver Work Trip

Posted on May 25, 2013 by Ching under Travel.

I was in Denver last week for our meeting with Avaya. Holy cow! Their Denver office is super nice. The picture below is of their patents that are on display in the lobby.

This is one part of their impressive lobby which puts the atrium in our building to shame. Not only are the walls glass, but the ceiling is made of glass as well.

Here’s photo of the glass ceiling.

It was a quick trip so we flew in early on Tuesday morning, spent the night and flew out on Wednesday afternoon. I caught Don using the hotel’s front desk computer to print his boarding pass.

I was supposed to caption this, “Don has options!” LOL.

P.S. I wish I could have taken pictures of their showcase lounge where they have several large monitors mounted to the wall, a large projector screen in the middle, and phones, computer workstations, and iPads set up all around the room. The cushy chairs swiveled and had built-in foldable desks so you could have a writing surface. It was quite impressive. There is no way to get cellphone signal in the executive briefing center, though. Oh, well. Perhaps we will get invited to visit again and I could take pictures of the room then.

1 Comment

Don’t Waste Your Singleness

Posted on May 25, 2013 by Ching under Tips.

Being single doesn’t mean you’re broken. This was the message last week at Riverlawn. Your single time is a time when you can really make a difference. Along these lines, don’t waste your 20s either.

Comment on This

Bonefish Grill

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Ching under Food and Drink.

We had a wonderful dinner at Bonefish Grill last week with Cari, Stacy, and Misty. Brian and I enjoyed their wonderful company and also some of our favorites at Bonefish: bang bang shrimp, lump crab corn chowder, and bang bang tacos.

I forgot to post the food pictures sooner, but here they are now. Enjoy!