For the past few weeks, the Husband has been in Atlanta for work so when I realized he’d be gone for our anniversary, I called up my girlfriends to see if they wanted to hang out. While hanging out with the cats at home would have been a fine time, I knew dinner and drinks in the middle of the week with my girls would be way more fun.
Back when the Cosmopolitan opened in December, the Husband and I had an opportunity to walk around and explore the funky style of the new hotel and casino. We’ve been watching on the blog world all of the good eats found throughout the resort and we’ve been talking about trying out some of them but hadn’t yet had the chance. Since one of my girlfriends works on the Strip, we decided one of the Cosmo restaurants would be a great girls’ night. I looked through menus from many of the locations, but was drawn to Jaleo, a tapas restaurant, because the three of us love to share! For those of you unfamiliar with Jaleo, there are the original three locations in the DC area (one I used to be able to walk to from my first post-college apartment), but I’d never been. I was looking forward to it!
All of the restaurants at the Cosmopolitan are using OpenTable.com for reservations so it was quick and easy to get one set up for us. Two of us showed up right on time and got seated even though third was still on her way. As we walked in, we walked through an open bar area, an area that looked almost like a sushi bar, and this giant grill.
The restaurant was nice and bright and open. I loved how bright it was – restaurants today seem to think that to be “trendy” or “cool” they have to have dim “mood” lighting – as a food blogger, darkness makes it so hard to get good photos! Thank you Jaleo for giving me light 
(however, I actually have to thank Picasa for these photos as I set my camera on the wrong light setting so they were a bit funky at first)
The menus were color coded – red for food, green for wine, and yellow for cocktails.
We all quickly decided to share a carafe of sangria.
Tons of fruit
It took us quite some time to pick through the menu and narrow down our choices. We decided to each choose one item (we even divided up the categories to make our individual choices easier) and in the end we threw in one or two other items. Each dish came out as it was ready and timing turned out nicely.
First up, we got a cheese plate – since a selection of 5 was a great deal, we decided to do that. There were 7 cheeses to choose from so instead of choosing 5, we chose 2 not to have. The cheeses also came with some bread topped with a light tomato sauce, dried apricots, raisins, and some nuts. In general, the cheeses were goat and sheep cheeses. I don’t remember which was which, but they were all good! (The ones we didn’t have were the blue cheese and one other?)
Up next, we had the Escalivada catalana which was open fire-roasted red peppers, eggplant, and sweet onions with a Sherry dressing. It doesn’t look pretty in this picture, but it was delicious. And an attempt at getting in some veggies!
Our next two choices were less healthy – both fried. First, we had the Chistorra envuelta en patata fritta which was slightly spicy chorizo wrapped in crispy potato (aka a potato chip). This was good but not my favorite.
The second fried dish came out in a shoe! I’m not sure why, but it looked like it was a popular dish as I saw many shoes go by. This was the Croquetas de pollo – traditional chicken fritters. According to their menu, it’s one of the most popular and I see why! (or taste why!) This was delish! (lots of exclamation points – guess this one made me excited). The chicken was tender and was mixed with a creamy sauce inside of a perfectly fried outside.
In addition to the traditional tapas, I was craving paella. The paella of the night was a lobster paella – generally I’m not a fan of lobster (I still haven’t had any that knocked my socks off) but I wanted paella (and the girls were up for it) so we had some. I thought it was fine – not my favorite paella, but it met my craving for the night.
Just as we started digging into our paella, our last tapas dish arrived – Mejillones al Vapor steamed mussels with bay leaf and white wine. This was a huge dish which was great. Some of the mussels were perfect while others were a bit too chewy. Overall, a good dish though.
At this point, we were satisfied, but not stuffed. We figured we’d find out what was on the dessert menu. When our waitress told us what was available, she got so excited about one that we just had to have it. We ordered the Flan al estilo tradicional de mama Marisa con espuma de crema Catalana – a classic Spanish custard (flan) with Catalan cream and oranges. Normally I am not a flan fan, but the texture on this was wonderful – firm yet creamy, slightly sweet, a hint of orange. It was a wonderful dish and perfectly shared between the three of us.
As expected, the food at Jaleo and was great and the sangria was enjoyable. Our service was outstanding – our waitress Mary Lee was knowledgeable, fun, sweet, patient (especially when our third was a half hour late and we wanted to wait for her to order), and just an overall great waitress. I’m so glad I got to enjoy my anniversary with my girlfriends with such an overall good evening. I can’t wait to try the other Cosmopolitan restaurants!
