So for our anniversary dinner last week, I wanted to try someplace we hadn’t been before. I advanced token to restaurant.com for ideas, because they’ve got coupons for cheap eatin’. And we’re old. And old people love their coupons. We narrowed it down to two Long Beach options: Ristorante DaVinci overlooking the airport, or Lasher’s downtown. We ended up picking DaVinci, (but didn’t buy the coupon because the small print was too limiting) and I embarked on the adventure that was trying unsuccessfully to get dinner reservations. I called their number repeatedly at different times, and just couldn’t seem to get through. We ended up deciding we’d just wing it and go, and if they could seat us great and if not we’d go somewhere else.

Well as it turns out folks, Ristorante DaVinci is totally closed down now. As we stood there reading the sign thanking patrons for years of restauranty fun times, dressed like respectable humans ready for good eats, the question became where do we eat now? We put in a call to Lashers, where they told us they were quite busy but sure, put your name in and we’ll see if we can fit you in. So we took our fancypants selves down to downtown LBC and omg guys, I know Lasher’s looks like a house outside but I was still amazed that it looked like a house inside, too.

What’s awesome about Lashers is when you walk in the front door and come to the host station to check in, there’s tables EVERYWHERE. And they’re a busy place so all tables are full of diners. And when you walk in everyone looks at you. Like you’re late to a fancy dinner party. It’s actually a tiny bit uncomfortable… I’m glad Josh wore pants to dinner for once. So they tell us they’re still really full, but they’ll try and seat us soon. We go out to the front porch and hang out, and listen to a guy in another waiting party completely monopolize their conversation with what could arguably be called the most boring crap ever about car tires.

About 40 minutes after we got their, we were seated in the mushpot/reject section of the patio. While we both shine up like new pennies, the wait staff must’ve had a sixth sense about our underlying jackreareryness. There’s a tenty area on the patio where everyone dining outside was sitting… and then there was our table. Just outside of the tent, in the cold. Our waitress brought over a patio heater, saying someone would be by to light it shortly. (Shortly ended up being like 30 minutes.) And we were finally on our way to dining adventures!!

While I was kind of worried it was going to turn into a bummer of a dinner attempt ending with us happily getting Avenue 3 pizzas and pimpcups full of beer, it didn’t turn out that way at all. Because we had our own little secluded mushpotty area of the patio, we were free to let loose and not be all huh-puh-puh quiet well behaved diners. We actually had a lot of fun, and a ton of laughs. Thanks in part to the wine pairings that we ordered with the choose your own adventure style dinner. The food was great, the mashed potatoes were EFFING AMAZING. And the booze was top notch.

Is that a good yelp review? I don’t yelp. I think I’ll start with just one line about Lashers: “They put us in the mushpot for not having reservations, but the booze was top notch.” Go Team!