Guy Fieri’s Chophouse, Atlantic City

Lance and I celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary earlier this month.

Eighth?

The reaction of most people is, “Wow! I can’t believe it has been that long!”, meanwhile I’m thinking, “Goodness, it has only been eight years?!”

I mean that only in the best of ways. I simply cannot believe that all the fun we have experienced as a married couple has been crammed into only eight years.

We aren’t big on celebrating our anniversary. We typically don’t even get each other gifts. We go out to eat, but then again, we go out to eat to celebrate things like the end of tax season, the end of the school year, or because it’s Friday.

That said, we didn’t spend too much time thinking about our anniversary or how we would celebrate. We tossed around a few ideas and landed on heading down to Atlantic City to try out Guy Fieri’s Chophouse. As most things occur for us, only as we were considering where to go did we stumble upon the fact that Guy only recently opened this restaurant in Spring, 2015.

The Chophouse is located on the sixth floor of Bally’s in a spot where a very upscale steak restaurant was once housed. It has a more laid back atmosphere balanced with a touch of class. I like it much better now. If you plan to go on a Saturday night, as with most restaurants, you’ll want a reservation. We had one, but showing up ten minutes early meant we were going to wait for ten minutes until a table was ready. Even the bar area was packed with few, if any, high top tables available. We were each served a pretzel roll immediately upon being seated. I don’t know why pretzel rolls and buns have suddenly become popular across America–but I’m hoping they are here to stay. This was such a pleasant twist to the ordinary dinner roll.

 

For Lance’s birthday I bought him two of Guy’s cutting boards, one for beef and one for chicken. The beef one pictured a cow labeled with where the different cuts of meat come from and the same for the chicken. I was excited to see Guy’s restaurant decked out with similar touches.

I convinced Lance to order the Pot Belly Sliders because they sounded too delicious to pass up. The meat is 48-hour slow cooked pork belly. In case you haven’t heard of it, pork belly is all the rage right now. It is the more flavorful, fattier brother of bacon. However, Lance is often hesitant to order it after being burned with severely overcooked pork belly in at least two different restaurants. I knew Guy would do it right though, and we were more than happy that we ordered these delightful little sliders. From the bun, to the sauce, to the pickles, my mouth was extremely happy with this starter.

Please don’t judge me, but I didn’t order steak. After the Pot Belly slider, I was in a mood for something lighter so I ordered Johnny Garlic’s Cedar Salmon (I was also highly considering the Cajun Chicken Alfredo, yum!). The unique addition of apricot jam sweetened and gave a little life to my healthy choice of a meal. Lance ordered steak, of course. While I did have a picture of his steak, the quality was so terrible I don’t want to insult such a beautiful piece of beef by posting it. Just imagine the most gorgeous T-bone steak you have ever seen topped with a dollop of confit garlic butter. I’m not going to lie; I was jealous. Luckily, Lance is a sharer and I got to enjoy two or ten bites of melt-in-your-mouth meat.

Ordinarily, I can’t stand restaurants where sides are ordered separately. But Guy’s sides are literally meals in themselves. They aren’t simply pointless portions of carbs or veggies meant to fill you, but they are packed with incredible flavors that make them stand out individually. I ordered the Yukon Gold “Butter Bomb” Mashed which, again, is not pictured because of poor cellphone camera quality. Imagine the best twice baked potato of your life and then you might have only a slight idea of what this bad boy tasted like. I’m sure our waiter thought we were insane when Lance then ordered a side of the Mac Daddy Bacon Mac N’ Cheese (pictured above).  Do you notice the little orange flecks topping the noodles? Any idea what they might be?

Cheez-its. This is a side that had my brother, Justin aka cheez-it lover, and my sister-in-law, Sam aka cheese lover, in mind. We could only manage few bites because we were so full from everything else, but the cheese sauce was divine. Not overly powering in flavor, and the perfect consistency.

We will certainly be back to Guy Fieri’s Chophouse soon. Though I loved my salmon, next time I will definitely be ordering steak. And dessert!