Another date night! Macaluso's

So apparently me and Danny are on an italian trend... not that i'm complaining. Tonight was a spur of the moment thing considering we had a date night yesterday, we heard of this place through family friends. We are BIG fans of meatballs and we were told that this place had "thee" meatball of all meatballs so we went. First off let me start off with that this place has no menu.... this is what arrived at our table:

They have different types of homemade pastas that each have a designated protein. You could mix and match to your liking, this was so neat! Everything is made in house and are family recipes which sounded so good. We went with this rigatoni cheese bake and chicken parm & the long curly spaghetti with meatballs. WOW the moment that my lips touched those heavenly meatballs it was over, how was i going to top these? they were served with a big dollop of ricotta.. yum. The chicken parm was also divine but nothing like the meatballs. To finish off our meal we had a vanilla cake, the best part of that was the creamy frosting and the vanilla bean ice cream.

oh yea deliciousness :) xoxo

Date night at Macchialina

So this past week Danny heard about this new restaurant that was opening up here on South Beach by the same owners of this place that we love called "Pubbelly". The place is called Macchialina, if you can imagine a tapas style restaurant that serves ITALIAN!! i almost died when i heard about this slice of heaven.. I love italian, everything italian. The thought of being able to try different dishes of this amazing cuisine thrilled my taste buds. Whenever we go to an italian place the portions are so large you can basically order one or two things at most without being stuffed. Now let me walk you through our amazing meal, I really don't know how this was not created sooner.
The menu is broken down into different sections for our "stuzzichini" which are snacks we had fried olives stuffed with gorgonzola and herbs with a date balsamic dipping sauce. The way i would describe this is explosion of flavor!

We also had from this section the stromboli which consisted of mortadella and fontina cheese.

For our antipasti we had some broccolini al cesare, this was toasted garlic and parm with broccoli. so cheesy and tasty.. just to think we haven't gotten to my favorite part yet :)

Now for Danny's favorite.. the Polenta. I am not really into polenta but this sounded too good to pass up. It had bits of spicy sausage that added just the right amount of kick. Doesn't look too appealing to the eyes but boy was it outstanding.

Now for the stars of our night.. The short rib lasagna, need i say more. My mouth watered when i saw this on the menu, short rib anything will satisfy me BUT in lasagna?!?! The picture does not do it justice, this thing had chunks of short rib all over ..deliciousness!

Last but not least was the cavatelli, these were baby meatballs with porchetta and pecorino.. oh so good. 

And that my friends was one of the tastiest meals I have had!