I’m just gonna run thru a quickie recap of the past week because I’m pretty exhausted from work today after getting up for a 7am conference call w/Hong Kong only to have it rescheduled *arggggh*. Also, I’ll try to keep it short because a certain someone said my writing was “dense” 🙂 .

So Saturday afternoon a huge blizzard was scheduled to sweep thru the east coast. In my infinite wisdom, I decided I would drive down to A.C. and spend the night there in order to avoid having to dig my car out of the snow the next day. Twoin of course was game as well, although his wifey would only let him gamble with what he won last time. I called up the Borgata and was lucky enough to get a comp’ed room for the night, but that would be about the extent of my luck for that trip. Was another losing trip, but we did have a couple of good meals. Finally got into the noodle bar I love so much and had the five spiced beef noodle soup. Super generous portion of noodles in a giant bowl of terrific broth and tons o’ beef and beef tendon (yeah, this was the real authentic shit). Also had the roast duck which was so-so, the roast pork which was decent, and a huge side of kimchi which was really quite good. To wash it down we had some chilled sake served in a wine glass. A healthy pour but I really didn’t care for the flavor too much. Yeah it was a veritable smorgasborg of jumbled asian themes going on. But the noodle soup itself was really superb and worth the wait in line to get in.

For dinner we went to the Old Homstead steak house. It’s a chain, but a fairly decent one. We had the kobe beef carpaccio, a dozen clams on the half shell and the steak au poivre. Along with that I chose the always big and reliable Cakebread caberenet. The carpaccio looked better than it tasted, although it certainly wasn’t bad. It’s just that the look of the marbled beef set the expectations pretty high but the flavor on the palate was surprisingly dull. You want great carpaccio, go to Flemings in Edgewater, but I’ll write about that in a future post. The clams were deliciously fresh and served with 3 sauces, but all I wanted was some lemon juice and a teeny bit of cocktail sauce. Then came the enormous steak au poivres. They were perfectly cooked in the traditional manner with a nice coarse rustic grind of black pepper for its crust. A terrific steak. That was about the highlight of the trip. Paid for both meals with comp points from our players cards and still had enough left over to go shopping. We figured we needed some new threads because clearly it was our clothes that were unlucky that day. Twoin bought a shirt and I bought a zippered sweater type thing. But wouldn’t you know it, the new duds didn’t change our luck. We busted out the next afternoon (figuratively and literally) and drove home thru the aftermath of the storm. That was that.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. Since Dawg couldn’t make it back from Seattle, I was his fill-in for the evening so his soon-to-be-fiancee C wouldn’t have to be alone on V-day, and because it was as good an excuse as any to go and try a new restaurant. C picked an Indian restaurant called Copper Chimney. They were doing a $30 prix fixe dinner with a drink, a choice of one app and two entrees, and a small dessert. C had heard about a specialty drink called the Coppertini or something silly like that, so she ordered one of those even though they said they had to charge us extra for it. It wasn’t worth it as it came to the table tasting like watery mango something or other but it hinted like it would have been pretty tasty at full strength. She also ordered a mango lassee. Pretty funny that she would do up the mango drinks while Dawg is away because he’s deathly allergic to mangoes. For apps we had a chicken dish and a paneer dish. Both were good but tiny portions. Even tinier were the “entrees” which both C and I mistook for sauces. I could have sworn I heard the waiter say “this is for the lamb and this is for the fish”. It turns out those *were* the lamb and the fish. We looked pretty silly after having finished all our rice with our apps and sitting there expectantly thinking there would be entrees coming. It was rather comical. The waitress comes over and asks if we’re done and we say yes as she clears away our plates leaving only what we thought were the sauces. She then comes back to clear away those and C and I were like ‘what are you doing??’ hahaha The waitress then straightens us out and says she was wondering why we hadn’t touched any of our “entrees”. She brought us some more rice and we wolfed down those “entrees” lickity split. For dessert was a chocolate shell filled with what tasted like sweetened ricotta and a slice of strawberry. Tasty but not substantial.

So we left there in search of a bar to grab another drink before I had to catch the train back home. After wandering around a bit, we decided to go into Les Halles which is Anthony Bourdain’s restaurant and a place I have been wanting to try for a long, long time. We grabbed a seat at the bar and I eyeballed their lengthy and pretty terrific wine list. I spotted the perfect after dinner wine- a half bottle of vouvray. Perfect. Along with that, we ordered…French Fries! *clap clap clap* Yeah, we were still hungry and I had heard that the fries at Les Halles are some of the best in the world. They really were nicely done. Lightly crispy on the outside but still potatoey on the inside. Imagine that! Fries that actually taste like potatoes! Anyway, we polished off the vouvray and most of the fries and called it a night. A very pleasant V-day. Now maybe I can convince Dawg that he owes me for keeping his girl company for v-day. 🙂

Dawg is back this coming weekend for Presidents day. Could this be the weekend he proposes? Stay tuned… If I don’t have that to report after this weekend, at least I should have some mah jong stories or other Dawg tales. Oh, and we’re planning on lunch at Sripraphai on Sunday. It’s the best damn Thai restaurant ever. Too bad we have to trek to Queens for it. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m denying my roots.

Damn, this turned into another dense post! 😀