I spent my new year’s eve playing mah jong at Wong’s house party. It was a small affair with maybe a dozen people or so, plus some random chick nobody really knew who disappeared into Wong’s bedroom sometime after midnight. No, not what you’re thinking; she was alone in there as Wong was passed out on the living room floor. The food was perfect for a casual get together like that. Mun, our Iron Chef Chinese did most of the cooking along with Wong’s friend T who provided a tasty brie en croute sort of thing. Mun’s chicken wings were a hit too, and Twoin brought a gigantic bag of pistachios for munching on while playing mj. I was drinking like a fool, having beer, lots of champagne (including a bottle of Dom that Twoin and J brought), jack and cokes and a whole bunch of the jello shots courtesy of K & R. Was a fun drunken mj fest for me. I started out not winning a single hand for the first two winds and paying out left and right. But somehow by the end of the night I finished up, winning $142. The strange random chick kept going to the bathroom every five minutes or so, but we were all too drunk to think anything of it. Everybody went home at about 5am I think, and I passed out cold on Wong’s couch. I woke up at 11am and found the apartment empty. I was going to leave but realized that there was no way to lock up after myself without having the key. So I called Wong who said to hang on because he was on his way back up. A few minutes later he comes back in with Oddchick in tow who rushes into his bedroom. Strange, but I was too hungover to care. I said goodbye to Wong and then drove over to Big Wong for some takeout. I got congee, beef tendon wonton noodle soup and a pound of roast pork. Big Wong’s roast pork isn’t as good as in years past, but their congee and noodle soups are still top notch. I spent the rest of my new years day watching football, enjoying my food and just trying to recover.

The following day, “New Years Day Observed” on your holiday calendar, I still needed a little more recovery time, but managed to muster up enough energy to bang out 5 rounds of Bas Rutten’s MMA Workout. It’s been my observation that drinking actually saps stamina way more dramatically than smoking does. Not sure why, but it definitely seems true. Anyway, feeling somewhat good about myself for at least trying to work out during my party-recovery, I decided to reward myself with a good meal. I scanned Opentable.com for available reservations and found a good one so I decided to take A to dinner at Cafe Gray in the Time Warner Center. I had never been there nor had I ever had Gray Kunz’ food, so I was looking forward to it. It turned out to be a decent experience, but it definitely did not meet the high expectations I had for it. I ordered a bottle of Robert Sinskey pinot and we started out with a tasty little amuse bouche whose description we could not understand thru the server’s thick accent. All I could discern was that it contained a brunoise of apple and topped with a tiny sprig of lemon thyme. Whatever it was, it was a nice start to the meal. That was followed an app consisting of three chinese soup spoons- one containing a yellowtail tartare, the second containing osetra caviar and the last containing a mixture of salmon roe with some other kind of fish egg. As you can imagine, you can’t mess up any of those items; they were as good as expected. Then I had the foie gras and quail app which had two succulent tiny quail drumsticks and a tiny piece of foie over a bed of what appeared to be tomatillo mush. Not bad, but well short of remarkable. For her app, A decided to have a salad (you know how girls are at the start of a new year) so I didn’t bother to sample that. Sticking with the healthy theme she went with the red snapper for her entree which was much more impressive. It appeared to be in a mint sauce of some sort, animated with a healthy shot of lime. For my entree I had the short rib. The meat itself was cooked perfectly and was delicious. Unfortunately it was smothered in an unidentifiable brick colored sauce, unidentifiable because whatever it was supposed to taste of was completely obscured by too heavy a hand with the salt. I gave it a chance but it was so salty I had to keep reaching for the wine to wash down every bite. Gray Kunz was not in the kitchen that evening, and I imagine he would not have allowed a dish to go out seasoned like that. Oh well. The baked alaska I had for dessert was nothing worth going into detail about, so I’ll leave it at that. On the plus side, for a high reputation restaurant like that, the meal was on the inexpensive side, even with a $100 bottle of wine and an extra app (the caviar), the total was still only around 3 bills. Parking in the underground garage was a different story however- $32 for 3 hours!

The following day was back to the ol’ grind at work. A really fast paced hectic but productive day for me. After work, I went to the liquor store because my case of Corison cab finally arrived. I had originally intended to bring a couple bottles to Wong’s party. Last time I went to the Rangers game with my friend E who now writes for Wine Spectator, I mentioned to him that Corison cab is my favorite American red and he told me he had met Cathy Corison a few months earlier. He gave me her email address so last week I wrote her to ask what was drinking well right now. Unfortunately it was too short a notice to get those vintages to me before new years eve, so I just went to my local liquor store and had them order me a case of whatever they could get a hold of. Turns out they could only get the 2002 and then it turned out they didn’t get it in time either. But I still wanted it anyway since I hadn’t met a Corison vintage I didn’t love (and I’ve had probably every vintage from ’91-’01), so I picked up the case and brought a bottle to R & L’s place for poker that night. It must have been good luck because this time I won. It was the same winner take all tournament format as last time, but this time my good hands got plenty of action. RL bet into me twice when I slowed down with strong hands and paid me off when I reraised. But the best hand of the night for me was when I made a correct read on RW. I had pocket 10’s when the board came A7A. I checked and RW immediately bet out 300. I didn’t figure he would have bet an A that fast, so I put him on a single 7, possibly a small pocket pair, but the way he had been playing, it was very likely he just had two unpaired face cards. I forget exactly how the turn action went after (too much wine), but we got some more chips in there but I had to hesitate when a Q hit the board. He ended up folding on the river to my putting him all in, so whatever he had, it wasn’t an A. After that I had a monster stack and things ended shortly thereafter. It was a $20 buy-in with 6 players and two people rebought. So I made $140 that night, got to enjoy some young Corison and hang out with good friends. Not bad for a Tuesday night!