Home again

So I’m back home again after a fun filled four days in Vegas followed by a couple of days of work in Denver. Things have been so busy at work I hadn’t given my body a chance to get readjusted until now (I just slept for about 11 hours, almost twice as much as usual!). Vegas was pretty much all about blackjack this time around. Amazingly I didn’t play any poker at all this time because the blackjack tables were so friendly to me I didn’t see the allure of grinding it out for hours at the poker tables when I could win just as much in half the time. Bought an iPod Nano; I think I should buy something from the Apple store every trip to Vegas. I gotta say, Apple really got things right with the Nano. I can’t help thinking this would be the perfect form factor for a cell phone. If they could build a cell phone exactly this shape and size with the same quality of screen, I would finally give up the clamshell style of phone I’ve always favored. The nano is so slim and narrow it can fit in the same front pocket with my money clip without being noticeable at all. Then again, my money clip was bursting with benjamins this trip. Also had two dinners at Mandalay bay, one good (at Mix), and the other spectacular (at Fleur de Lys). There’s an adjoining lounge at Mix which is at the top of the THEHotel at Mandalay Bay and it has the greatest view of Vegas I’ve ever seen. Open air deck with a tall plexiglass wall to prevent people from falling off (or jumping I suppose). The dining room was pretty cool/futuristic looking, but I can see how some people might think it tries too hard. The food itself was really good by mortal standards, but disappointing for Alain Ducasse who by all rights should be considered a culinary immortal. Tuna tartare was pleasant but did not dazzle, the foie gras was nice and generous but could have been seared a little more, but the cod was superb. The really memorable meal came the following night at Fleur de Lys. In contrast to the sterile futuristic vibe of Mix, the dining room at FdL was all warm and inviting, and L and I got seated in a cozy little round booth surrounded by heavy velvet curtains for privacy. We had a five course tasting menu with an accompanying wine pairing. The wine pairings were pretty textbook and whomever designed it didn’t seem to want to take any chances which is understandable considering how outrageously good the food was. I must say, every single dish that came out had something unabashedly glorious about it. The coolest thing was that although I just ordered the 5-course tasting menu, it turned out that my menu was different than L’s, so we were able to taste almost twice as many things since we were doing the plate-swapping thing. Sauces were prepared with care and dishes were dressed with those sauces and broths with a delicate hand. Always enough so that you could appreciate it, but never so much that it overwhelmed the main ingredients. Out of all the amazing dishes that night, two of them stood out to me. First were salmon “raviolis” in which resembeled ravioli only in shape. Instead of pasta, the ravioli skin consisted of paper thin slices of salmon, and the stuffing was a velvety guacamole. An ingenious presentation of the familiar salmon and avocado combo and boy did it work. The second mind blowing dish was the beef rib. It was prepared three ways but the least sauced version really allowed you to taste the chef’s fine handywork. The beef had been perfectly braised, and yet somehow retained all of its beefy flavor, not just the fattiness which usually overwhelms most beef rib dishes. The beef itself was so good I realized that I couldn’t even remember what the sauces were! Damn that was some good beef rib… Suffice it to say, if you go to Vegas and you love food, you MUST eat at Fleur de Lys. Oh yeah, and another footnote, which sounds an awfully familiar from a previous post, they also had a Moscato D’asti as the dessert wine for their wine pairing 🙂 Not the Saracco like at CT’s, but still a very nice ligh Italian one.

So with one truly extraordinary meal under my belt, all my winnings from blackjack, plus getting my room at TI comp’ed, I was feeling pretty good for my business trip to the Denver office. It was good to meet with everyone there just to put faces to the names if nothing else. The only really productive thing I did out there was something that could have been done from NY anyway- a conference call with the dev manager out in Hong Kong. I’m going to be taking the reigns of a major project for which my own team doesn’t have the bandwidth, therefore I’ll have the HK group at my disposal. I wonder if I can get a trip to HK out of it. We’ll see. Meanwhile, I had a very nice dinner at a restaurant in Denver called Rioja. Had a surprisingly good tuna tartare/carpaccio combination. I say surprising only because it was out in Denver where I didn’t really expect great seafood at a restaurant like that (it was not a high end snooty restaurant, just a comfortable classy after work kind of place). Had the grilled salmon entree which was also really good. I almost never like cooked salmon, but they agreed to prepare super rare. Why did I order it at all you ask? Well, it was served in a creamy corn chowder and that sounded like a really great pairing. I wasn’t wrong. I wolfed down the whole thing and sopped up every last trace of chowder with bread.

So that was that and now I’m back and work is even busier than ever. Fortunately a bunch of my co-workers will be out of the office for a few days next week so I’ll be able to get a lot more work done than usual. If I can just get caught up with work a bit and then really kick off this big new project I’ll be feeling pretty good. Also, I’ve got 7 more vacation days to take this year. Hrmmm… not enough days for a good trip to Japan…but it could potentially be 3 more trips to Vegas!

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