Eat. Travel. Eat!

Mercado La Paloma, a local community gathering place, is also home to a fine hodgepodge of quality restaurants--Thai, Ethiopian, American, Mexican, and Yucatecan cuisine can be found here. Chichen Itza, the restaurant that consistently has the longest queue of all the restaurants, specializes in Yucatecan cuisine (southeastern Mexican cuisine)-- the menu is filled with unique regional specialties . After ordering in person at Chichen Itza's counter, one receives a wooden stand with a number (for the employees to keep track of where to bring food to). Prior to the arrival of the food, an employee will bring over beverages as well as Chichen Itza's house Habanero Hot Sauce. It's a potent, fruity, extremely spicy, and slightly acidic hot sauce.

It happened to be Easter on a recent trip to Irvine (coincidentally, we did this also three years ago ), so was it the time to take chances and drive to an unexplored area of town for lunch? Not really. So, we headed to a familiar location -- Fashion Island -- and finally tried out True Food Kitchen, which was under construction back when we visited its next door neighbor, Flemings .

The comments from last week's survey requested unanimously for a Mexican restaurant in Arcadia , and so here it is! Zapata Vive is one of the Mexican restaurants in Arcadia where the atmosphere is decidedly more Mexican compared to other places as well as sunny. And if you can't tell already by my writing, I have been here quite a few times. (However, this post only has photos from one visit and that is the first time I brought my camera to this place) Additional plus? There are routinely coupons for Zapata Vive in the local mail, and there are also restaurant.com gift certificates available. Thus, if you have extra airline miles from United that you don't plan on using for flying, switching for gift certificates is a great option- and using it here is a good option, as the main condition is 35 dollars minimum on food only, which when you have a party of four is easy peas-y. Plus you can use it any day of the week and any time of day, including lunch. I do no...