This weekend I dined well. Once I let a restaurant do the cooking, and once I did it, and both times my dining companion had good things to say. This is doubly pleasurable, because the restaurant happens to be one of the best in my area.
Photo of food looking colorful.
I was glad to go first with a sautee of chicken breast and rotini with snow peas, zucchini, green onions, and cherry tomatoes. It was lovely with a little sherry, garlic, and cayenne sauce. Dining companion raved and was grateful for leftovers which fed her for lunch the next day.
Then it was Bin 54, a "steakhouse and cellar" (local review here) and hard act to follow if I had followed; also an indicator of how chichi the Tar Heels' stomping grounds have now become. Twenty years ago, the place was a Chinese buffet with an aquarium where dinner for two cost about $12. Next door was a laundromat. No longer.
Bin 54 is pricey, with a few cheaper options. An American Kobe beef ribeye steak is $59 for the steak alone-- yes, potatoes extra-- but if you want a hamburger and fries, they're available for $14.
My companion and I were dining on the dime of another, so we did not worry about price, and that made all the difference.
For our main course, we split a prime porterhouse. The kitchen cut the (sizable) steak into six pieces, two on the filet side of the steak, and four on the strip side. In the middle, a big t-bone that would have been excellent for a dog, except that (as I discovered upon trying to donate it) cooked steak bones can splinter and hurt a dog if they're swallowed.
To make sure we were getting the full experience, we ordered the steak "Oscar" style, which caused to appear on our table a tureen of crab meat and asparagus spears with regal robes of bearnaise sauce, intended to be poured over steak.
Our sides: King Trumpet mushrooms and Yukon Gold mashed potatoes.
Three words: W-O-W.
For an appetizer, we had the tuna tartare with green onion, wasabi crackers (rub on tongue to get tingle), and creamy soy sauce. As my friend Todd would say, "tasty."
For dessert, companion had flourless chocolate cake with a sauce that was painted on the plate like a Dutch chocolate master's dream. I had sorbet, because, of course, one needs to eat light after such a heavy meal. The mint sorbet was especially good with a spoonful of Rembrandt sauce and flourless cake.
For wine, I ordered a sampler of three different reds, and two were extraordinary: the Stoller Vineyards JV Estate '06 Dundee Hills Pinot Noir (Oregon), and the Livingston Moffett "Stanley's Selection" '04 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon (California).
Wine commands many adjectives ("earthy yet insouciant") and noun taste comparisons ("pencil shavings and lingenberry"), but for me wine tastes like memories, and these two made a movie in my head.
Good Pinot Noir to me tastes like every meal I've ever had where there was nonstop laughter and joy. The cornucopia of fruit makes you feel giddy and the pepper makes you want to sneeze, but you don't, you just laugh a little more.
A good California Cabernet takes me directly back to the times when women wore their hair like Farrah Fawcett and every summer day was a day of swimming at the beach or the lake followed by a long, leisurely dinner in the fading light.
I think if I drank more good wine I would probably suffer from Post-Rhapsodic Gush Disorder.
So it's back to Hacienda Merlot, which is a darn good everyday wine, folks, and chicken and rotini.
But at least once I hope you go to Bin 54-- or your local equivalent-- where you have complete freedom to order whatever you want. Then the meal becomes like chicken and rotini in that it is eaten with love, for the sake of the food, and without any other expectation, reasonable or unreasonable.
Photo of Farrah from here.