Miami

After our Key West adventure, off we went to Miami.  We stayed at the St Regis Bal Harbor, which is something Lingon had wanted to do for a while.  The hotel was beautiful.  The rooms were large and well appointed, with an amazing view of the ocean.  This defines luxury.  We redeemed points, otherwise the rooms were out of our price range.

 We checked out the grounds which were beautiful.

 Then we went to dinner at Khong River House, which I posted about here.

As part of turn down service, we even got these chocolates which I heartily gobbled down, followed by eating the leftovers from Thai food.  Lol.

 The next morning we decided to run around Bal Harbor to get some exercise and to check the area out.  There was a shopping center with some really high end stuff.  Always nice seeing what crap is out there.  Then, we went to lunch at Chalan on the Beach, our favourite Peruvian place possibly ever, and got our must-eats, lomo saltado and ceviche.  The bread was amazing too, with their green special sauce.  MUST GO HERE!!

Then, bye bye Miami.

Khong River House, Miami

I have been a tad obsessed with the Travel & Leisure Thai food list.  So when we decided on our Caribbean trip and that we were going to connect through the Miami airport, I knew we had to go to Khong River House.

The restaurant was one of the nicest Thai restaurants I have been into.  They had a Beauty and the Beast library-style bar, with floor to ceiling alcoholic beverages, complete with a ladder, greeting us as we entered.  The furnishing was very Asian, a lot of medium-toned woods.

For starters, we got the Burmese style wraps and papaya salad.  I thought the wraps themselves were OK, but they used a "sweet soy sauce" which I absolutely loved, and later found out was the thick sweet soy sauce with  sriracha.  The papaya salad, which was described by the article as "peppery green", was more green and less peppery, and though it was a nice dish, it was not at all special, and lacked the oomf in spiciness.  For the large plates, we were excited about the crispy duck that the article discussed, but found out it was no longer on the menu.  So, we got the seared duck breast with roasted eggplant, squash purée and massaman sauce, and I found that to be quite a lovely dish.  The squash purée was so perfect.  We also got the banana leaf wrapped trout which was succulent and smoky.  As an afterthought, we decided to get a pad thai, which did the job but was was relatively unremarkable.

Well, we were not wowed by the experience, but that was one off the list, so I'm happy about that.