Restaurant Review for Dora, La Jolla

Make a reservation for Dora as you leave the La Jolla Playhouse, or the day before if you can remember to, as they have limited indoor seating an additional outdoor seating and part of the indoor seating is just high tops.

The hostess is exceptionally accommodating, as is a catch all server (not ours), who is so incredible, making every table feel like they’re more than welcome, that I tip her $20, as I do the hostess as well, for changing us to a booth from a high top.

As we get seated we hear a completely different story than we had heard from the hostess with our waitress insisting the three course meal is the only food available. According to her, there is nothing available a la carte.

I order an insanely expensive glass of wine, which turns out to be no more than a 2 ounce pour.

I won’t go into the details, of why she doesn’t tell us there is a 2 glass wine pairing available for almost that same price. Won’t discuss all the short pours she did or how she spilled wine all over our table, and did not do a good job of cleaning it up, obviously fed up having overheard our conversation about the short pours. What I will say is: the food is very good. And the rest of the staff is ah-mazing.

We start with a salad Laurie is very happy with. In my world, if you are running a restaurant and one of the 3 courses is salad, you have to make available choices on the dressing. I pass mine to her. Vinegar and oil as their one alternate, close to the original choice, just doesn’t cut it for me.

The second course is ravioli for Laurie, and I get Mary’s Organic Airline Chicken.

Laurie enjoys her ravioli while I indulge in the Chicken dish, which is so well prepared, so moist, so delicious, so beautifully plated that I am forgetting how rude our waitress is.