Entertaining Friday: Miami Recap

If we learned one thing from Top Chef this week, it's that a bachelorette party is entertaining, right? Right?

Well, maybe not, but Cail's bachelorette party, held last weekend in Miami, really was entertaining. So entertaining, in fact, that I realized this morning that I took exactly two pictures, and they were both with my Blackberry. So glad I charged my camera battery for the trip.

As a result, I have only one picture from our snack at Nobu, and I don't have a single picture of our Friday night dinner at Yuca, where I loved the empanadas and the Asian-influenced sauce on the tuna. Or of our adventures later that night, which mostly involved champagne at the outdoor portion of the hotel bar.

Fortunately, Cail took lots of pictures, like this early-morning of the lounges at the pool at The Shore Club:The Shore Club, as previously mentioned, was a great hotel and the pool was outstanding. We spent all day Saturday sitting on those chairs and swimming in that corner of the pool, while we drank frozen drinks and gossiped with the other guests and the pool staff about all the famous people in our midst. Famous people that included Vin Diesel (very low key), several Carolina Panthers (as low key as professional athletes can be) and the owner of Penthouse, accompanied by 10 of his "pets," all in town to shoot a "film" (not very low key at all). I have never seen anything like that show in my entire life, and I don't expect to see anything like it again.

Dinner on Saturday night might have been my favorite part of the whole weekend. Based on several recommendations, we'd made reservations at Casa Tua, a pretty restaurant tucked into a prettier hotel, all hidden behind tall hedges, several blocks off the Collins Ave.

We started dinner with champagne, a surprise courtesy of Cail's parents, then moved into shared appetizers, including this tomato salad with burrata - possibly the creamiest, most fantasic mozzarella I've ever tasted:All of the dishes had the same simple look and feel, but they all also packed a huge punch, flavor-wise. In addition to the salad, we shared lightly fried zucchini flowers stuffed with ricotta and mozzarella (why go easy on the cheese?) and a salad of crab, melon and proscuitto that was so light with just the right amount of savory.

For dinner, I had seared diver scallops (perfect) with a fennel gratin that reminded me of a more flavorful potato pancake. I also stole a bit of Erin's ravioli stuffed with quail, served with mushrooms and truffle. It was exactly as heady, intense, and amazing as it sounds.

We skipped dessert that night to head off to LIV, where we had a table waiting. Hours and hours later, we returned to the hotel, where I slept for a couple of hours, then got up to begin one of the worst traveling days of my life.

But worth it.