I've been hanging onto this entry for so long that it almost doesn't have any meaning anymore! It's about my last big meal with friends before leaving New York.

Two of my high school friends and I had been having monthly dinners for about a year, and for my last meal before leaving for Taiwan, they wanted me to pick a cuisine I knew I wouldn't be able to have here. Immediately, I knew I wanted Mexican food, but I wanted it to be a fun place, and preferably one in Long Island so we could make one last Target run together (another tradition we began tacking onto our dinners).

I found Cozymels, which is a chain restaurant, so it's definitely not anything unique ... but that doesn't mean it wasn't fun! I loved the atmosphere, which had all the typical skeevy colorful string lights which made it look like a place that should have had the word "tequila" somewhere in its name, and probably the word "sunset" or "rain" somewhere in there too.

While discussing what we would order, we started out conservatively, but over time, I think the mentality became, "to hell with it, it's our last meal together for a long while," so we ordered more food than I knew we could finish.

We started out with guacamole ($10) (warning: all of these photos will be on the greenish side because the lighting in the restaurant was pretty much limited to those colored string lights I mentioned, so we had to get creative and use the light of one smartphone to make everything photo-ready). This was good, made better after we squeezed in the lime juice from our margarita sampler. Not the best guacamole I've ever had (that would be at Toloache in Manhattan and also maybe Rosa Mexicano), but very good nonetheless.