Taste of Beauty in Fountain Valley is a plant-based fine dining restaurant where fresh, seasonal ingredients become art that you can see, smell, touch, and taste.

The menu is designed to remind us of the breathtaking beauty of this planet we call home. Each dish depicts a geographical landscape and blends flavors from cuisines worldwide. Just as every culture and cuisine are connected, we share the same responsibility for Mother Nature.

The restaurant offer a 5 course and 8 course tasting menu with a choice of vegan or vegetarian for each menu. We decided to order one of each so we can sample both.

If you’re a die hard meat eater like me, the thought of spending hundreds of dollars on a veggie only menu may seem like a waste of money. However, please don’t let that stop you from trying one of the best fine dining experiences in Orange County. Every dish tasted great and the presentation was amazing.

Dinner for four came in at $628.68. The restaurant added an 18% service charge, which I assumed was the tip. However, when I went to sign the credit card receipt, there was an addition line of tip. I didn’t mind that the restaurant added 18% tip/service charge to the bill. However, adding another tip line to the credit card receipt was a little off putting. Other than that, a Taste of Beauty is a much try for anyone interested in plant based find dining.

The card connects via NFC to the ELLIPAL App. Wherever you go, whether it’s a cafe or airport, your crypto stays within reach. The X Card support 40+ Blockchains, 50+ Stablecoins and 10,000+ Tokens.

You can set up a brand-new wallet or recover it using your seed phrase. Each card has its own PIN code, ensuring only you can access your funds. You can set up multiple cards for backup or more accounts. You can also easily duplicate your wallet to 10 X Cards in minutes.

The X Card is very beginner friendly. It only takes 1-3 Minutes to set up and no tech skills is required. Setup is done 100% Offline. This makes the X Card immune to online attacks. Get it direct from the Ellipal Amazon store

Nep’s approach to Vietnamese cuisine is innovative, moving beyond traditional boundaries to present a contemporary Vietnamese dining experience. The cafe is the destination for those seeking to explore what’s current and what’s to come in Vietnamese cuisine. Most of the traditional Vietnamese dishes are available at Nep, but they’re presented in a modern and upscaled way.

Our lunch started with a seafood ceviche appetizer made from scallop, shrimp, calamari and bended with a tom yum sauce made from Thai chili, mango and coconut. It was paired with some rice chips for use as a container. Put the ceviche into the chip and then eat the whole thing. Extremely tasty!

Up next was the Nep’s garlic noodles. Made with garlic butter soy, lemongrass sate, and garlic, this dish will remind you why Vietnamese cuisine is among the best in the world. The dish is offered with your choice of shrimp or crab meat. We went with the shrimp. It was charred perfectly and goes great with the noodles.

The final dish was the reason we came to Nep in the first place: the Bánh Mì Chao. This dish includes various meats (most popular one is usually beef bò né), sausages, eggs and pâté on a skillet eaten with loaves of bread. It’s basically a deconstructed Vietnamese sub.

Our Bánh Mì Chao came with filet mignon in a black peppercorn sauce, two sunny side up eggs, pork roll, pâté, and tomatoes. The bread come on a side basket. You can eat it separately or combine it with the main dish.

Lunch for two came to just over $40 per person, which is higher than a typical Vietnamese restaurant, but still offers decent value for the level of quality and service. Irvine is not short on Asian restaurants. It takes a lot of stand out in this city. Nep Cafe has managed to do that with its unique take on the taste of Vietnam.

RAYA, a restaurant concept by Richard Sandoval, showcases Pan-Latin Coastal Cuisine prepared with sustainable seafood, local produce, natural and organic meats, and Chef Sandoval’s signature Latin flavors. RAYA was named named “Restaurant of the Year” by Riviera Orange County in 2011.

RAYA is located in Ritz Carlton hotel in South Orange County. The room is beautiful, luxurious and unique. In good weather, the terrace is a better choice but inside the restaurant still offers a panoramic view of the ocean.

The menu is divided into three sections: shared, small plates, salads & soup, and specialties. We didn’t brother with the soup or salads because the offerings didn’t look that interesting. Instead, we focused on the restaurant specialties, starting with the wagyu beef tartare.

Wagyu stands for Japanese cow, but I highly doubt the beef come from Japan. It was still very tender, just not A5 level. The dish is prepared tableside using black garlic aioli, coinichon, cured egg yolk, pickled mustard seeds, green olive tapenade and grilled focaccia bread.

I’m not sure why the dish was done tableside. It wasn’t much of a show. They could have just as easily prepared it in the kitchen and brought it to the table, and you wouldn’t miss anything.

Roasted cauliflower with peanut guajillo sauce and smoked grape chimichurri. This is one strange dish. Take a whole cauliflower head, but don’t cut it up. Instead, roast the entire thing in the oven until you create a crust on the outside, then hide it in sauce. Strange but good.

Seafood enchiladas made with shrimp, Dungeness crab and lobster. Covered with a creamy guajillo sauce and served with heirloom cherry tomatoes. One of the best tasting enchiladas I’ve ever tried. It’s also the most expensive enchilada I’ve ever tried.

The above dish is call Mariscos A Lo Macho, which is a traditional Peruvian seafood sauce that’s savory, hearty, fragrant, and slightly spicy. It can be pair with pretty much any seafood. In this case, RAYA paired the sauce with sea bass, tiger prawn and little neck calm mussels. Yucaa, tomato and salsa criolla complete the dish.

Scallops and pork belly on a cream corn sauce. The ingredients were all place on one side of the plate, making me wondered if something was suppose to be on the other side. Both scallops and pork belly were extremely tender.

RAYA had four desserts on the menu, and we decided to sample two of them: a peaches and cream parfait and a lemon cake. Both were really good and great way to end the meal.

Dinner for four came to a little over $100 per person, which is quite reasonable for a fine dinning restaurant. If you find yourself staying at the Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel (it’s really in Dana Point), dinner at RAYA should be part of your itinerary.

South OC cars and Coffee is the biggest weekly car show in the world. Every Saturday, over 1000 cars and 10,000 people show up to the San Clemente Outlet mall for a morning of car spotting and a cup of coffee. If you’re in the area, you should definitely check it out. The show runs from 9am to 11am. Enjoy the video and photos.

While Batman has the Batmobile, Bruce Wayne has the Pininfarina B95 Gotham. A visionary collaboration between Automobili Pininfarina and Wayne Enterprises to build a car befitting its billionaire CEO. This 1900 hp hypercar transcends mere speed, offering an exhilarating experience of daylight freedom, encased in a luxurious design inspired by the vibrant streets of Gotham City. Check it out with all the other supercars and hypercars in the video.

Just because it’s Monterey Car week doesn’t mean South OC Cars and Coffee is canceled. The shows goes on no matter what, and despite the big event in Monterey, a lot of cars and people show up to the biggest weekly car meetup in the world. Enjoy the video and photos.

I visit the Petersen Automotive Museum for the VIP launch of the new CSX2900 by Shelby Legendary Cars. The CSX2900 is limited to just ten examples and will cost $650,000 each.

The Shelby Cobra CSX Tribute Series of roadsters are the ultimate salute to Carroll Shelby. Original factory blueprints were used for the aluminum bodies, which follow every line of the first Shelby Cobra. The cockpit, interior, one-off bodywork and authentic leaf spring suspension with a correct Salisbury rear end and inboard brakes, are identical to those on the prototype Shelby Cobra.

The only car of its type to be approved for production, each handcrafted roadster will have a Shelby serial number and MSO from Shelby American. The roadsters will come as completed rollers configured for a small block Ford V8 with a Borg Warner T10 transmission to be installed by the customer or shop of their choice. Owners of the limited edition “sport car” – as Carroll Shelby called it – can choose their color and whether to install the optional rollbar that was added by Shelby American after the car’s debut.

Some say modding a supercar like the McLaren Senna is sacrilege. This Senna belongs to Daily Drive Exotics and it’s one of a handful of modded supercars in their garage. I personally like it.

What I like more however is the Evoluto Ferrari 355 Restomod. Upon its debut in 1994, the Ferrari F355 was a cutting-edge sports car, and Evoluto Automobili can help you bring the classic Prancing Horse up to modern standards with a restomod treatment that includes a body redesigned by the great Ian Callum.

The conversion process includes stripping the car down to the bare chassis. The company then installs carbon-fiber bracing to improve rigidity, then the new Ian Callum designed body panels are installed. The Ferrari 3.5-liter naturally aspirated V-8 receives over 200 revised parts to increase the output to 420 hp. These mods include ported cylinder heads, larger intake valves, new camshaft, solid lifters, and a coil-on-plug ignition system. The new V-8 can rev to 8500 rpm, which should sound like music to a car guy’s ear.

Evoluto plans a limited run of 55 units for its special 355. Each car will be bespoke and tailored to the customer’s needs and wants. The price of all this is £695,000 (about $885,000 USD at the current exchange rate) plus the cost of the Ferrari 355. That’s actually quite the bargain when you consider what a company like Singer charges to restomod a Porsche 911.

Inspired by the lowered truck era that lasted from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s and Maverick customers already personalizing their trucks for performance, the Maverick Lobo is a new canvas for modern street truck builds.

Lobo is the street-performance version of Maverick. It offers a lowered ride height and an on-road tuned suspension with tuned shocks and a 2.0-liter EcoBoost engine that makes 238 hp and 277 lb-ft of torque.

Ordering for the 2025 Maverick Lobo begins Aug. 1, with deliveries starting in early 2025, and late availability on high configuration models.