Celebrating at the Cosmopolitan

From the first time I visited semi-recent addition to the Strip, Cosmopolitan, it became a favorite. That made it easy when I was planning my big birthday night out. I knew Cosmo had pretty much everything I wanted and all in a pretty convenient package. 


We started at Comme Ça, the David Myers French Brasserie upstairs for a girls dinner. It was good to have an intimate dinner like that. Let's just say Em and McC are a pretty vivacious combo. We feasted on delicious artichoke salads and flatbreads and then McC and I decided to get crazy. Comme Ça offers a Beef Wellington for two, served with a kind of black-eyed peas and kale succotash and peppercorn sauce. I conquered that Beef Wellington. McC was defeated by its girth. It's hard to blame her though. It was some serious Beef Wellington. 

Next, we moved on to the dessert course. I picked the Beignet au Chocolat, satisfying McC's love of bananas foster and Emily's love of chocolate. Our waiter, Nick, had them write me a birthday message in chocolate and since he had been so kind as to recommend some delicious espresso cocktails to go with dessert, I took his additional recommendation that I lick the plate. (Apparently, he'd been trying to get someone to do that for ages and I was the only one to oblige.) 

The meal was such a success, we thought, why end it there? So McC may or may not have slipped Nick her phone number and he may or may not have joined the party downstairs in the Chandelier Bar.


Corraling large groups makes me anxious, so I was happy once I found everyone and felt like I could relax with my London Summer cocktail. It was great to see everyone-- old high school and Buddhist friends, my old buddies from the newspaper-- some people I hadn't seen in years. People who taught me how to drive, people I won a State Championship with, people who taught me how write something like this blog right here.


And the ambience at Chandelier (excepting the truly tragic girl one level above us who kept leaning over the bar in the shortest dress ever to reveal to us she was not wearing any panties) is divine. If you want good photos from an evening, go there. 

Finally, as we all started to turn into pumpkins, we went to see our friend go-go dance at Bond. There, almost got in a fight with a tranny and danced to an oddly nineties mix of music, recalling our days of teenage glory when we'd drive around like good-hearted brats in Gia's BMW. Those were the days. And so are these.