My cousin Carissa got married this past weekend in a small private ceremony at their condo complex in Weehawken. This was a wedding that was supposed to have happened last year on the same date as Dawg and Chye’s, but it got postponed so in the end everything worked out…especially for me!
A bunch of my California cousins came out for the wedding weekend, including Tony and Nancy whom you’ll recall I hung out with when I was kickin it in the LG a few months back. Just like it was in Los Gatos that weekend, there was much drinking to be done, but this time I at least got one night of rest for my liver because I was a designated driver on the day of the wedding. My sister and adorable niece and nephew came down from Boston and were staying with me so I happily got to chauffer them around for the day. We scooped up Nancy from her friends place in the city and made our way over to Weehawken.
Carissa and Ben’s condo is in one of the countless condo complexes that have sprung up on the Jersey side of the Hudson with a view of Manhattan. We arrived plenty early and since everyone was hungry and it was such a cold blustery day, I decided to drive just a few miles further up the road to Mitsuwa in EdgeWater for some udon noodle soup. We killed some time there and then made our way back down to the wedding.
It was a very small ceremony presided over by some guy who was eloquent and polished but who I come to find out had no real association with the bride and groom. Just some guy they hired I guess, but he did a great job I thought. Short and sweet and then it was off to the reception!
We only had about a mile to drive to get to Arthur’s Landing, a restaurant right on the water with more of those great views of NYC. It’s the sort of place that is designed for cookie-cutter functions, and the food selections reflected that. From that description I’m certain you can guess precisely what they offered. Yep, filet mignon or salmon for the entree, creme brulee for dessert. To their credit, they technically execute those dishes without fault. That is to say, every filet I saw was a perfect medium rare, every piece of salmon correctly barely cooked through, and the sugar shell on the creme brulee had the perfect thickness and brittleness. But they were every bit as uninspired as they were correctly cooked. Simple vegetable accompaniments, no interesting saucing, not even freshly ground pepper, and no flecks of real vanilla in the creme brulee. It was very mechanical cooking; worthy of an A in Home Economics class and exactly the sort of thing you’d put in a time capsule if you wanted to tell future generations what defined the stereotypical 20th century banquet hall menu.
And as technically perfect as the dinner’s execution was, the wedding cake was the exact opposite. Actually, the yellow cake and the strawberry filling were actually fine, but the “frosting” was an absolute disaster. It was a smooth white coating about 1/8″ thick and behaved something like leather or what you’d probably get if you applied 15 coats of Glidden semi-gloss to your walls and then peeled it back before it dried completely. Wow. It was like baseball glove leather. I seriously wonder how they cut the cake. As I tried to poke my fork into it, the tines literally could not penetrate the frosting and I ended up smushing the cake beneath it. Only when it was bare frosting on plate could I get the fork through it. And all that did was punch 4 holes into the frosting. To get a piece of cake that I could fit in my mouth, I had to completely perforate the frosting this way until it was sufficiently weakened enough to be slain.
Cake aside though, it was a nice wedding and great to see some of the family members I’ve not seen in a long time and some from Cali that I had never even met at all. It was a good time and it was particularly sweet and heartwarming to see my cousin happily married. I just hope she doesn’t do that traditional custom of saving a piece of wedding cake to share on their one year anniversary. Although if she did, I bet she wouldn’t even need to freeze it.