Posts Tagged ‘fine dining’
Fine Grill
Despite the dreary conditions yesterday –rain all day in February!?– Cyndie and I braved the low-visibility drive to meet our friends halfway for dinner on Valentine’s Day. Barb and Mike drove east from the far side of Lake Minnetonka and we drove west from our place and we arrived at the St. Paul Grill at the same time –ten minutes before our 6:00 reservation.
Their car was immediately in front of us in the line for valet service. What were the odds of that?
It is such a treat to be pampered by professionals on a night out at a fine-dining restaurant. The doorman wearing a deadman wool felt top hat guided us in dropping off and picking up our cars with wonderful panache. He had us feeling like Hollywood royalty.
Once seated at our table, we met our server, Hillary, who paced everything to a T with the support of a precision crew of runners and bussers.
I guess it proved the adage of getting what you pay for because this was not an inexpensive night out.
It would have been great if I’d captured a shot of the scrumptious food as soon as our plates arrived but doing anything other than eating when dinner is placed in front of me becomes near impossible.
By the time I thought to pull out my phone to capture a record of the aftermath, it was all napkins and coffee cups. You miss out on seeing the fancy Delmonico ribeye steaks, pan-fried walleye, signature hashbrowns with bacon and white onions, and asparagus spears with hollandaise.
Since it was Valentine’s Day, conversation was peppered with recollections of our first dates, engagements, and some foggy details about discovering first pregnancies. I won’t go into detail about the story of a card from a game that read: cooler of organs being misread as “cooler of orgasms.”
Our hearts were filled to overflowing with great friends and great food leading to a really great night out. We didn’t let all that rain dampen our spirits one tiny bit.
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Impeccable
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friends
a milestone birthday
fine dining
The St. Paul Grill
impeccable evening
shared Caesar Salad
signature dressing, baked croutons
Salmon, perfectly done
topped with seven spice butter on a bed of sautéed spinach
what a sauce, a jamboree of flavors
shared sides
Hash Browns
with bacon and white onions
Asparagus Spears
perfectly, perfectly cooked
Creamed Spinach
two bites of her Bourbon Pork Chop
one of his fries
a bite of her Filet
medium, with mushrooms
three shared desserts
bittersweet chocolate, whipped cream, caramel drizzle, ice cream, more chocolate
immensely satisfying
did I mention
impeccable?
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Cosmic Evening
Our experience last night was indeed cosmic in the colossal sense. Joined by our friends, Mike and Barb, we dined at the ever so fine Capital Grille before catching Neil deGrasse Tyson presenting his “Cosmic Perspective” at the State Theater.
Typically, I was rather lukewarm to the idea when Cyndie purchased tickets last fall. April seemed so forever away and why would I want to drive to downtown Minneapolis to sit and listen to an astrophysicist talk? Now I know why. Neil deGrasse Tyson is hilariously entertaining while expounding on mind-expanding perspectives from an astrophysicist perspective.
The icing on our cake of an evening was the fact that Cyndie included Barb and Mike in our plan and selected a fine dining establishment that shares a wall with the theater. We feasted like royalty and were lucky to be served by a sublime professional who guided our selections and timed our meal with impressive expertise, right down to slipping in a delectable coconut cream pie serving for dessert with just enough time to allow me to run a doggy bag of leftovers to the car in the parking ramp down the block.
Then, it was time for the show. From the moment Neil kicked off his shoes by the podium and addressed the crowd with his good-natured, approachable delivery, I felt myself becoming an instant fan, along with seemingly everyone else in the audience, if they weren’t already.
Almost every detail or relationship of the universe he highlighted was affirming in its scientific simplicity, even when it was equally mind-boggling in complexity. The molecules in the air we breathe and the water we drink have been on this planet for centuries upon centuries and passed through others for eons.
We are built out of the same elements as the stars of the universe. It isn’t our uniqueness that makes us special, it’s our ‘sameness’.
The hubris of thinking we are anything more than we actually are is laid bare by the multitude of examples presented from a cosmic perspective. For me, it resonates with my understanding that the more we come to know, the more we realize how little we actually know.
Neil’s sharp wit provided non-stop chuckles and frequent bursts of laughter throughout the delivery of interesting scientific details about our world and its place in the universe.
When the talk appeared to be going long, he put up a universal permission slip for us all to use, especially kids for whom it was a school night. He said to take out our phones and take a picture, so Cyndie did.
We just fill in our names and we have a ready made excuse for staying out too late.
I’m not sure it will hold much influence for our horses and Delilah if we don’t serve their morning meals at the expected hour, but it helps in our minds to feel justified in our exceptional evening.
It was truly cosmic.
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Fine Dining
We went out to dinner last night with Mike and Barb who spent the night so they could give us a hand finishing the board replacement project on our deck today. Dinner was at our local favorite destination restaurant, Shady Grove. It’s about two minutes away from our house in a structure that looks like it used to be a house, though serving food as good as the fanciest downtown restaurants in Minneapolis.
The difference is in the extraordinary flavors. That is what sets each bite apart from what we typically experience eating out at most other comparable restaurants. A simple dinner salad comes alive with any one of their custom-made dressings providing a notable accent. I chose honey-mustard and was greatly rewarded.
Maybe the secret is in the sauce because our fun appetizer guilty pleasure of deep-fried Ellsworth cheese curds came with a surprise cup of sweet/hot chipotle sauce for dipping and that definitely took things to another level of goodness.
Even the fresh-baked rolls seemed to be graced with an extra flavor beyond just bread.
Maybe I was just that hungry.
The second I got home from work, I went out on the deck to make sure the last few old boards were pried up and nails removed in order to be as ready as possible to maximize progress today. I built an appetite before Mike and Barb arrived.
For my entrée, I chose the fish fry with a side of wild rice blend with dried cranberries. I like my fish mild, so the filets I enjoyed were more for the texture than flavor, and it was perfect in that regard. The rice blend, however, was irresistibly flavorful and that had me gobbling it up like I hadn’t eaten in weeks.
Regretfully, I was so taken by the nirvana of my eating experience that I forgot to take a picture of the meal. It would have complimented this post nicely. I was so busy living in the moment that I didn’t think to capture a shot in order to revisit it later.
I don’t think it would be smart to eat such good food every night, for fear it would become mundane and my senses dulled to the splendor.
Fine dining is fine because it is not just everyday food. If we ate this well too often, the experience would become ho-hum.
Last night was truly fine.
Here’s hoping today’s deck progress will be comparably fine. Looks like we are going to have weather that qualifies for that descriptor: fine. That is, as in, highest quality.
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All About
Cyndie. This Weekend, it’s all about Cyndie as we celebrate the milestone of her 60th birthday. With Jackie tending to animal chores at Wintervale, Cyndie and I are submersed in the loving energy –and I do mean energy– of the Friswold family. We are staying at her parent’s house in Edina, MN, but have twice in a row found our way to downtown Minneapolis.
Last night, it was dinner and music at the Dakota, where we ate like royalty and swooned over Shawn Colvin‘s very personal solo guitar song performance.
This morning, Cyndie is sleeping in. My brain is busy trying to process the onslaught of activity, memories, and emotions –not to mention distractions of mental and physical preparations for my biking and camping trip that starts on Friday– conspiring to confuse me over whether it’s all about Cyndie, or all about me right now.
I had the great pleasure of starting the day yesterday riding bikes with Cyndie’s brother, Ben. He rode over from about a mile away just as a rumble of thunder rolled over us.
We took pause inside to watch the radar long enough to see we would have a perfect window of opportunity after a very short wait. The tiny disturbance sliding south of us was just a precursor to the precipitation that would arrive in the middle of the day and hang around for the afternoon.
While the sky was watering the earth, more of the Friswold clan gathered for lunch at Jimmy’s restaurant near our old Eden Prairie stomping grounds.
After a little nap before heading out for the night, attention turned to a gift brother Barry presented to Cyndie. Her jaw dropped when she saw her younger face on the cover of a memory book of pictures he had spent many loving hours to produce.
Just as she finished a first pass through the overwhelming collection of memories the images trigger, we stood to witness Justify run for the triple crown. Then eleven of us headed out for dinner and the concert.
With noted local musician and song-a-day YouTuber, Zachary Scot Johnson opening the show for Shawn Colvin, we were treated to a range of guitar-accompanied stories, providing me with a second recent prompt to wonder whether I am still a guitar player, or not.
A variety of reasons have combined to allow months to pass without my spending time with fingers on frets. I am inclined to blame my yet-to-be surgically treated arthritic left thumb as the primary culprit for the hiatus, but deep down, I have a sense I may be giving that more credit than is due.
Somehow, while distracted with too many of my own concerns rarely focused on accomplishments, I have been granted the chance to flutter around the bright light that is Cyndie for 44-some years.
It makes for a tangled web that isn’t so much all about her or me in the end. It really has become all about us.
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Relative Something 