Christmas Foodie Tradition

I hope you and yours had a happy merry holiday. Ours was swamped with twisted USB cords, tiny game cards, and lots and lots of books.  I got a new iPod, with mega-memory that will hold allllll our CDs. The kid got a Nintendo DS.  Not Your Average Blogger got the entire history of Holy Land excavations. Ergo, an extended bloggy absence.  That, and a couple outings.

I think y'all know I'm pretty fond of my kid, and we drag him along to a lot of things that maybe other people wish we'd leave him home. (Including him, probably.)  DInners out. The theater. Occasional forays to the office.  So far this season he's been out for dinner twice and sat through the Nutcracker.

So we left him home when I gave NYAB and early birthday gift of tickets to West Side Story. This is a greater gift than you might think, because honestly, of all the musicals on earth, this one is probably the only one I will mock openly and without restraint. People, I had to bite a hole in my tongue to keep from laughing until the first intermission.  NYAB got up to use the facilities and I got all my rants out of my system by sending snarky Bberry messages to Best Boss Ever.  NYAB returned, with the following conversation:

"OK, you can't laugh about this ANY MORE.  Even Russ Grimm is here."
"Huh? How do you know?"
"Because I saw him."
"Well, did you talk to him? What did you say?"
"I said, 'Hey, you're Russ Grimm!'"
"And what did he say, 'Yes, but don't tell anyone you saw me here?'"
"NO. He just said yes and shook my hand."

So that was all nice and fun and good.

But last night was one of my favorite Christmas traditions -- the one wherein we ditch the kid with a sitter and go have dinner at the Willard Hotel.  It is lavish and decadent and represents the one time a year that I eat and drink expensively without a lot of regard to how much I'm spending or whether I finish everything on my plate to make it worth the price.

It's fan-friggin'-tastic, man. Last night was no exception.

Last year was a $45 glass (yes, GLASS) of champagne.  Last night was two mint juleps.No photos, because it is very dark in the Willard and the drink is very dark and all the photos came out looking like a glass of iced sewer water with a lemon peel on top and that is just not fair.

(A word about the mint julep. I first encountered this drink in literature -- The Great Gatsby -- in my early teens and it sounded sooooo good. Doesn't it? Like it is ice and mint ice cream and chocolate and little bits of cotton candy and pixie dust, right?  So imagine my disappointment when my 16-year-old self is in New Orleans with my parents at a very lax-on-IDs bar and upon ordering one I'm presented with a glass of bourbon and some chunked up mint leaves in a glass with some ice cubes. Whaaa? I made a very sad face. My mother laughed. I think my father drank it for me. Fast forward 21 years, and I am pre-theater dining in the very hotel where the drink was invented. Heck, sez I, it's been 20 years. And I like bourbon. Let's take a shot. People, it was soooo good. It is mint leaves and crushed ice and bourbon and little bits of crunchy sugar and drunky dust. So when we are there for dinner a week later, I get two. Yessss.)

Aside from drinks, we had an amuse-bouche of foie gras cappuccino. It tasted about as you'd expect. The bread was better, imho. I had duck canneloni for an appetizer and NYAB did not eat the venison he ordered as it showed up looking a bit like a slice of spam on a plate.  But the main courses didn't disappoint -- NYAB had sea bass and I had prime rib. At that point neither of us was particularly interested in dessert, but we glanced over the menu and didn't really see anything to change our mind. (Especially since I was pretty sure that Best Babysitter Ever and the YP had made cookies in our absence.) So we called it a night.

It was an odd night for dining companions, however.

First, there was the guy dining alone at the table next to ours -- RIGHT next to ours -- who engaged both us and the couple at the table on the other side of him in occasional conversation. It was sort of sad yet annoying. I mean, I'm a big proponent of being nice to those dining alone, but if I want to invite them to my table I do so. And when I'm dining alone -- I take a book, I don't expect the people around me to take me in like an orphan.

Second, apparently it was dress-up night for the DAR or the Ladies of the Confederacy or something, because as we were wrapping up with the check and whatnot a slew of creakity old men in tails and dickeys came in accompanying a swirl of ladies in hoopskirts and ringlets and lace shawls and feathers. I am not even kidding. It was bizarre, but it made for a nice backdrop as their outfits were a nice match for the Willard's chandeliers and heavy oak partitions.  No photos -- I couldn't bring myself to be quite that obviously rude -- even if I did have to choke a laugh into a cough when one old guy dumped his water glass into his plate.

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Next time, send me snarky comments. West Side Story makes me laugh so hard it is unseemly. Rather, it makes me roll my eyes so hard it sounds like gumballs rattling around.