Oooh! Look at the View from The Sky Room

For my 5th Wedding Anniversary, I booked a reservation at the Sky Room in Long Beach, CA. I made my reservation through OpenTable.com. I’m not trying to make a sales pitch for these guys or anything. The reason I mention them is because I’ve seen a few restaurants use that system (like Lawry’s Prime Rib, which by the way, is supposed to be excellent.) so I was a bit curious as to how efficient and easy to use it was. Whatever enhances the dining experience, right?

OpenTable’s sign up process was painless, they did need my phone number (to confirm my reservation) and email address though; no biggie. You can browse through hundreds of restaurants and their availability for the date and time of your choice. It seems to be real-time or at least updated regularly. OpenTable offers free memberships and they offer a dining rewards program. Every time you make and fulfill a reservation, you get 100 points. There are some select restaurants that that yield a good 1000 points per reservation. What do you do with these points you ask? You get Dining Cheques! I’m guessing you can only redeem them in restaurants which are part of the OpenTable network. But they do have a decent selection, specially in LA, so no problems there. My reservation was confirmed within 5 minutes via email and the day of the reservation, I received a call from the restaurant to reconfirm. Excellent! Overall, this was a pretty cool experience which I’ll definitely repeat. The downside? Some cities have very little in terms of dining choices, but that is nothing time won’t fix.

Now on to my review of The Sky Room in Long Beach! As expected, there weren’t any problems with the reservation upon arrival. We were sat down promptly at table overlooking the Long Beach Performing Arts Center and the LB’s Rainbow Harbor. I have to say that the view is more impressive during the day since you actually get to see the ocean. Another bummer was the Hyatt Hotel blocking your view of the Queen Mary. If I were to go again, I would either opt to go during the daytime or I’d site on the other side of restaurant, where it overlooks the city.

I apologize in advance for the sucky pictures I took. The restaurant isn’t very well lit and I didn’t really want to look like some weirdo playing with his camera in an upscale restaurant. The interior decor had a very “art deco”style, I almost felt like I was back in the early 1900′s. Our good natured host/server took good care of us, joking around and make dining recommendations. Many brave souls even trusted our server enough to have him order their entire dinner course, and I have to say, he didn’t seem to disappoint them.

We started with some Pellegrino sparkling water and a glass chardonnay. We also ordered the Filet Mignon Skewers; Filet Pinwheel, served with a red peppercorn cream dipping sauce. The Filet Mignon was excellent, extremely soft and tender. Practically fell off the skewers. The white and black toasted sesame seeds gave it a very “Asian” flare as well. It really made me regret not ordering that as my main entrée (more on that at the end).

The next course was our salad. My wife picked the Sky House Salad which consisted of hearts of romaine, hericot-verts, tear drop tomatoes, bufala mozzarella, carrots, fresh basil, and tarragon in a curry vinaigrette. My wife didn’t care too much for the mozzarella, I devoured mine. I really liked how the fresh basil gives a special flavor to the salad and the curry vinaigrette was surprisingly light and flavorful. This is probably the most unusual “house salad” I have ever tried. I always think of “house salad” as a bag of “ready-serve” mixed veggies with ranch dressing. This definitely did not look or taste like one.

Around this time, the live band started playing a good mix of jazz and oldies. So, as expected, couples started getting up and dancing. I was in awe as to how many “older” couples where simply taking over the dance floor. There was one couple in particular that practically danced to EVERY song, I’m not kidding, EVERY SINGLE SONG! It seem like they where there to dance, not eat. When we were done with our dessert, they where STILL working on their entrée. Anyway, the band was awesome, they played a great mix of songs, salsa, jazz, 80′s pop, etc… Definitely one of the highlights of the night. My wife and I even snuck in three dances before the night was over.

For our entrée, my wife had the Slow Roasted Scottish Salmon (sautéed spinach, saffron fingerling potatoes, and citrus shallot confit) and I had the Pepper Crusted Ahi Tuna (Wasabi mashed potatoes, grilled baby bok choy, finished with a Ponzu sauce). The tuna was seared, which they didn’t mention in the menu. So my wife was kinda grossed out by it (she doesn’t quite like half-cooked fish). It was good, however, it tasted rather plain if I didn’t dip it in the Ponzu sauce. The Wasabi mash potatoes were pretty tasty considering I don’t really like plain mash potatoes. The bok choy was presented rather nicely (it was cut like a flower), but I like the greener leafs, so I didn’t eat much of that.

The salmon my wife ordered was a bit dry, but it wasn’t horrible. I think that the spinach was excellent because it retained all of the flavor of the salmon and it was sautéed to perfection.

To wrap things up, we ordered the Chocolate Soufflé. It took a while to make (around 45 minutes or so) so we did a little dancing while we finished off our drinks and waited for our dessert. When our Chocolate Soufflé arrived, my wife and I got really full just looking at it. It was BIG. Our server cut open the top and poured a mix of whipped cream, vanilla ice cream and rum. It looked delicious! Unfortunately, I’ve had better. Truth is, the Chocolate Soufflé didn’t taste like chocolate and it wasn’t very sweet if you didn’t scoop up enough of the ice cream. The rum didn’t do for me. Don’t get me wrong, I like rum, I just don’t like it in my Soufflé. I have to say, this was probably the biggest disappointment in the entire evening.

After some great Filet Mignon Skewers, a good House Salad, two average Tuna & Salmon entrées and a disappointing Chocolate Soufflé, my wife and I concluded that this place was great but not excellent. To keep things in perspective, I have to say that things would have been excellent had we ordered the Filet Mignon for our entrées and gotten something else as our dessert (like maybe Tiramisu). Which is why I’m hesitant to rate the Sky Room anything less than 4 starts. After I do know how the Filet Mignon tasted like(it was AWESOME) and the live band created a wonderful ambiance that was perfect for our occasion. So two and a half hours later and $157 poorer (yup, that was my tab after tip for 2 people), we were happy, full, had a great time and we won’t hesitate to go back for another round in the future.

The Sky Room
210 E Ocean Blvd, Long Beach, CA 90802 MAP IT
Tel: 562-983-2703