Since I have moved to Arizona one of my main goals was to experience all of the tastes that Arizona offers. By experiencing these different restaurants I am able to discover new foods that I may want to work with in the future. (I also enjoy eating and tasting new things!) I find it extremely hard to find every delicious place here but decided it would be cool to share some of the restaurants I have found. We try to find one new restaurant at least when visitors come. With our last visitor we couldn't just pick one, so we went "food hopping". Food hopping is where you pick one specific area and hop to different restaurant for one particular item, usually what they are known for and share between a group of people. We had a total of 6 people in our group. We decided to choose the Phoenix area of Arizona for our food hop experience. First on the list was Welcome Chicken and Donuts. Similar to the chicken and waffles this restaurant allows you to have both sweet and salty in one meal. Recommended by the cashier, we ate two chicken combos with a side of Ginger Scallion Cucumber Salad and Thai Yum Slaw. We also had a key lime donut and a simple cake donut. Holy cow! Every aspect of our meal was delicious. I especially loved the cake donut with fried chicken! Here is the website for Welcome Chicken and Donuts: http://welcomechickenanddonuts.com/.
This is a picture of our cake donut and fried chicken, along with our cucumber salad. Yum!
This is a picture of our key lime donut. The donut itself was delicious, however I am not a huge key lime person.
The next stop was Phoenix Public Market and Café. I picked this place mainly for their nachos and macaroons, strange combo but both delicious. It is in the heart of Phoenix and represents it well. The cool thing is that during the weekends they have a farmers market just out side their restaurant which I have attended as well. It has an urban yet cozy feel. Along with their food they also have a coffee bar, which my sister was intrigued by. She wanted what she calls "cappuccino art". We enjoyed everything all they way up to the last bite! Here is the link to Phoenix Public Market Café's website: http://phxpublicmarket.com/cafe/.
This is a picture of our King Dave's Nachos and the guacamole was probably my favorite part.
After attempting to make macarons, I was interested in trying other peoples macarons. We chose two flavors a salted caramel and a vanilla. The salted caramel was incredible and looked so pretty too!
This is a picture of my sister's cappuccino art and I have to say it looks pretty cool! I will attempt to master this next ;)
The third place we went to was La Grande Orange Grocery. We were pretty stuffed from the last to restaurants but needed to have a taste of something. So we tasted some their gelato. The iconic flavor of Arizona is Prickly Pear, so why not? My brother tried the pineapple and I chose the Prickly Pear but both were so good! Here is the website for La Grande Orange: http://www.lagrandeorangegrocery.com/.
The last place we decided to go was Portillo's. Being from Illinois, we always love going to a Chicago inspired restaurant. Portillo's is famous for their hotdogs so for our last and final meal of the day we had hotdogs. We were so hungry at that point we forgot to take a picture of the food :) but all I can say is that it was delicious. Here is the link to Portillo's website: http://www.portillos.com/.
That is it for this week I hope that
you were either inspired by these recipes or are planning on eating them
yourself. Feel free to comment because I love to see every one's feedback
and if you haven't already followed my Instagram account @izzabeleandcompany feel free to
follow. Don't forget to check out my next blog post and happy cooking!
