Finding a good restaurant is like finding an oasis in a dry desert; it shines and you never forget its location. Sam, Shane and I are always in search of that perfect restaurant – with the perfect ambiance, service and food. We’ll take at least two out of the three, more often with an emphasis on food, not to sound too epicurean.

Our quest continued with a visit to a famed restaurant chain, California Pizza Kitchen, or CPK as it is endearingly known. From experience, plan to arrive at least five to ten minutes earlier than planned, as it may take a while to find parking in the Holiday Resort & Spa area on a Friday night.

I arrived at the restaurant a little after 8 p.m. to find Shane waiting in the reception area. The both of us are usually the ones who arrive at get-togethers late, so we took a quick look around the restaurant to find Sam. Kindly enough, one of the waiters did a walkthrough around the restaurant looking for an assigned table with one lone guest waiting for her party.

Once we ascertained that the tides had turned and Shane and I were “early,” we joined the group of people waiting to be seated. We experienced a very minimal wait – not even five minutes after the hostess handed us that disk with the flashing lights to advise the availability of our table – which reminds me so much of that “Simon” game – we were seated.

Wanting Sam’s input on our choices, we opted to wait to place our orders. Instead, we ordered cocktails as an aperitif – a refreshing CPKolada for Shane and a marvelous mango mojito for me.

Once Sam arrived, fresh from an apparently sentimental movie that had her in tears before the closing credits, we proceeded to scrutinize menu items and their descriptions. It turned out that we would embark on a culinary trip around the world through pizza and pasta.

To start, we ordered lettuce wraps – an appetizer of minced chicken with shiitake mushrooms and water chestnuts. I remembered something similar that I had eaten in Hong Kong last year, except instead of chicken meat, the dish featured pigeon meat.

The lettuce wraps appetizer also included a spicy chili ginger sauce, which added more flavor and deepened the dish’s richness. Shane opted to skip the extra sauce, which was a tad salty for her taste. Not a lazy appetizer, the dish requires you to scoop some of the warm minced chicken concoction onto a cool, crisp piece of lettuce and intently enjoy. Without sounding like the panel of judges on Iron Chef, the three of us could agree that the texture and taste intertwined pleasantly to our delight.

Next, we traveled to bustling Bangkok with the Thai crunch salad, which, when it arrived, Shane remarked as visibly busy. A mixture of shredded cabbage, chilled grilled chicken breast, julienned cucumbers and carrots, edamame, peanuts, topped with lime cilantro sauce was presented in its most artistically abstract form; however, the salad’s exciting experience excused its eclectic anomaly.

Among the three of us, we all agreed that the crisp crunch of rice sticks, cabbage, cucumbers and carrots meshed well with the tenderness of the chilled grilled chicken in a tangy Thai peanut dressing. If the lettuce wraps and the Thai crunch salad were any indicator of the rest of our meal, we were immensely excited.

Continuing our East-meets-West adventure, we sampled kung pao spaghetti. The enjoyable dish, combining a concoction of westernized kung pao sauce, garlic, green onions, peanuts and hot chili peppers, coated a bed of spaghetti noodles.  It’s the classic Chinese favorite kung pao chicken with comfort-food spaghetti – why didn’t I ever think of that? I’m sure a homemade version of the dish will invade one of our kitchens soon.

After departing Asia, we landed in the Texas-Mexico border with our order of the chipotle chicken pizza. A labeled Mexico-phile, I have been searching for some good chipotle-based dishes or salsas, so I readily agreed to order this dish. Within a few minutes of indulging in our other dishes, we said “¡hola!” to a fair sized thin-crust pizza with diced chicken pieces and jalapeno peppers. In the center of the pizza was a dollop of Tex-Mex culture – corn and beans mixed with a pico-de-gallo-like salsa. The pizza reminded me of a mini-sombrero.

While the pizza was different from pizzas we’re used to, Sam and I were iffy about the flavor. I, for one, wanted a more dominant sweet-spicy flavor of chipotle. Shane, on the other hand, enjoyed the pizza. We then knew who should take home the leftover food that we were too stuffed to finish.

Although we did eat heaps of good food, we practiced some constraint in order to sample one of CPK’s desserts. We chose the chocolate banana royale cake a la mode. The cake wasn’t as heavy as we feared, and the banana cream wasn’t overbearing. Collectively, the cake, with its chocolate mousse topping, banana cream center and drizzles of banana cream and hot fudge is enough to entice a non-sweet tooth to enter the realm of desserts.

Overall, we were pleased with our experience at CPK. The restaurant has a hearty selection of items on the menu that we have yet to try and the service was great. When we find time to be gourmet socialites again, CPK would be one of the restaurants on our radar.