Merry X'mas

ok, just to show that my life does have a softer side, and this is WAY overdue, i just wanted to share christmas w/the fam

and christmas dinner at the pseudo-fam's, Debs' house:

old ties

recently got a chance to meet up w/1 of the attorneys i worked for prior to starting law school. He's an alumni of BLS and was in Brooklyn for work so he sent me an email to meet up at Saul's for drinks. plus, when it comes to eating and drinking he has impeccable taste.

1st off, i got totally lost on the way over b/c Saul's is located on Smith St. between Dean and Bergen which is a total of 4 blocks from Feil Hall but Egg and i were chatting and discussing and ended up walking all the way to Union Street (which, if you don't know Brooklyn Heights geography, is pretty far south from where we intended to go). we finally get there and sit w/Ross and Lisa, Saul's wife, and have a glass of champagne and just do some catching up. Ross, who's a huge oenophile so naturally he'd brought his bottle of red, something from the Arejos vineyard circa 1998. phew, it was so smooth and delish and i'm scared to think of how much that 1 bottle cost. we all started w/a scallop appetizer in a curry lemongrass broth. the scallop was super tender but the surprise was the last bite. i took my last bite and got a huge burst of citrus, which totally shocked me. Egg had the exact same experience and we discussed the ingenuity of creating such a dish. yum yum.

i, stupidly, had eaten before we'd met up b/c i figured it was 9 pm and maybe Ross had already eaten but no no. he let Egg and i taste some of his squaw and i started salivating hard core. Ross chastized me for eating before meeting w/him and i just commented that Egg actually hadn't eaten and, voila, Egg got his own plate of squaw served w/a side of risotto. i kept picking at his food b/c it was so good. finally we ordered dessert and i got Baked Alaskan for the 1st time, which was overall very good even tho i think i could do w/o the meringue part on top (i've never been a big fan of meringue. does that make me weird?) and Egg's molten chocolate cake was divine.

so, got to enjoy a great meal at a place i probably couldn't afford on my usual law school salary (being sarcastic here) and the place was cozy w/amazing food. the fact that it was packed on a random tuesday night is a testament to how good it is.

and so it begins...

it's restaurant week again in NYC. went to Megu w/Gohm, Chow and Tina for my 1st Restaurant Week dinner. initially i thought their prix-fixe menu was kind of week. no options, no choices. just a yuzu caesar salad, kobe beef steak smothered w/black sesame and ginger and spicy tuna roll. however, we did notice during non-Restaurant Week Megu offers a prix-fixe menu of $80 which is actually a great deal. it offers a choice of any hot/cold appetizer from the menu, any soup, any salad, any entree and dessert. too bad for us they weren't offering it during Restaurant Week.

Tina and i both got the prix-fixe menu and Chow and Gohm ordered a la carte. Gohm got hamachi carpaccio which was good, the fish tasting very fresh. the yuzu caesar was surprisingly really good, but that might've just been b/c i was pretty hungry considering it'd taken us about an hr to decide what to order. Gohm and Chow both ordered the scallop foie grais (so so so good), really tender and the foie grais sauce is amazing. the kobe beef was actually really yummy and Gohm ordered saikyo miso chicken which was decent. Chow's lobster was the best tho. the few bites i had were very flavorful but still moist. yum yum. for dessert i've actually forgotten exactly what we got (i know, what a travesty! my favorite part of the meal! i don't know what that says about Megu's dessert...) but i think it was a molten chocolate kind of dessert and something w/green tea. o well, the dinner was overall good and the atmosphere was very nice, and service was pretty impressive (w/a few slip-ups). i think it was most fun due to the company.

it's all kosher

so Gohm and i had another productive saturday a bit back. always, momentous, so had to write about it.

the previous night Gohm and i went to eat at Chiyono and had an very satisfying home-style Japanese dinner. the food is very impressive. we started w/gyoza and a soba salad. the pork gyoza was so light and full of flavor and the soba salad was light as well, but hearty at the same time. the seasoning on the soba salad was so flavorful but still light. i really liked it. afterwards Gohm got the ground pork katsu which came out in 3 small patty-like portions served w/an amazing salad and i got a egg-battered cod which came w/potato salad. both entrees were, again, amazingly light and the only qualm i had was that the cod still had small bones in it. what surprised the most was that initially we both felt we might need more food, not feeling the heaviness that comes w/a filling meal but w/in 20 minutes after finishing our entree we both had the an amazing sense of fullness. overall i really liked the meal and its originality.

the next day we met w/Chow and Tina to go see Children of Men. omg. amazing movie. the themes are so current dealing w/present-day issues and to see those kinds of themes presented in visual imagery is so affecting. unbelievable and while i would love to spend crazy time discussing it, don't want to present spoilers to such a good movie. just definitely go see it. and don't get mislead by the trailer, while yes, the movie originates w/the idea of infertility of the human race, it goes into such much more. the loss of innocence in world w/o children, the combative aspect of human nature and what can bind that race together, hope and despair, inhumane treatment of ppl, segregation, interment camps, current immigration issues... so much. my mind was completely abuzz after the movie.

later, we all went out to dinner at Park East Grill, which is a kosher steakhouse. a novel idea, but the concept didn't play out overall. i had a corn salad appetizer, which was good and refreshing but not the usual expectation i have for corn salad. we also had generic lettuce cups as a group starter. Gohm and Chow ordered prime rib which was served w/mashed potatoes and they ordered an additional side of white wine sauteed spinach. i had the lamb chops also served w/mashed potatoes and Tina ordered 2 starters as entrees, beef skewers and mushroom puff pastry. Tina's pastry was salty and the skewers weren't anything better than usual, all the mashed potatoes were cold, and while my lamb chops were ok, Gohm seemed to have a lot of fat on his prime rib.

after dinner Gohm and i capped off our night w/drinking and card games w/Egg back at Feil in Brooklyn.

Cliche Law School Scandal

welcome back to BLS! which means final exam grades have been posted and a whole new semester of classes and briefs and outlining and...o man!! well, in order to tepper that fact SBA decided to have an event at Floyd's which was, as these things go, pretty fun i must admit. Even got Wifey to go out and Gohm to cross the Brooklyn bridge on a thursday night.

Adidas was pretty drunk before we headed out and came over while i watched Grey's Anatomy. At some point he started to harass Wifey and they were scurrying back and forth between my room and hers hitting and harassing each other. and i realized i'm back in school. like school, school; like college-school. i guess i thought it'd be different since everyone's older, but school just makes everybody a student again.

had a great time at Floyd's, ran into ppl i have classes w/and bonded and then we took Adidas to Happy Days Diner to get some food in him to sober him up and then headed home. Here's where the scandal comes in. Wifey ran into the Bobsey Twins while we were there and turns out Tweedledee was there w/her Civ Pro professor. who is around his 30s. and very hot. and the Bobsey Twins are reknowned for their "easy" morals. the next day rumors were abound that Tweedledee hooked up w/Mr. Civ Pro. and Wifey claims she heard a strange man voice in our apartment around the wee a.m. hours.

sigh, hooking up w/the prof? and coincidentally getting an "A"? that's just so cliche...

Gay or British?

i saw this title somewhere in a long time ago and i still think it's very applicable b/c it IS pretty hard to tell whether someone's gay or just British. it has something to do w/the way they dress and their mannerisms...

so Papoose came to visit me from the UK, or so i thought... he had flown to Chicago to attend a fellow abroader's wedding (wow, i still can't wrap my head around the fact that ppl my age are getting married). While i love friends visiting, especially someone as important a historical figure as Papoose, i like things to be planned. i hate spur of the moment (i know, i'm old now). i got a call from him on New Year's day saying he would be arriving in NY on the 2nd. after not hearing from him for 3+ months. then he asked me if he could stay at my place. what could i say? especially since he doesn't seem to really know anyone else here.

He and Rob showed up at my place around 10 pm starving and thirsty so we went to O'Keefe's around the corner and did $3 pints and caught up. it seems they've been having a ball showing off their British accents to all the dumbstruck American girls they meet (yes we are easily impressed by those British and Aussie accents). Afterwards we headed to Floyd's and had a few drinks before heading home to sleep. Pretty quiet night since nobody was back at BLS yet. The next morning they headed off to NJ to visit friends and family. and then i lost them for 36 hrs. yep, no word from them about what they were doing/when they would be back, and since they only have international cellphones i couldn't call them. so annoying.

Poor Bubs, Kir and Debs had wanted to see him too but since he was MIA Debs, Bubs, Wifey and i met up at Yakitori Taisho for dinner hoping he would just ring up and meet us while we were out but that didn't happen. either way we had a great dinner, even w/o Papoose. when i finally did hear from him it was the day before he was leaving and he told me he would be going to a show in Williamsburg for a friend's band which i just didn't feel like doing (plus i was pretty miffed) so they just picked up their stuff and headed their own way.

And that was my Papoose experience.

Happy New Year!

yea!! it's 2007!! wait, i'm not sure i'm so happy about that. i just feel older. and that means more things i've got deadlines to do before the summer hits... aww man...
anyways, Gohm made dinner plans to spend New Year's eve at Le Singe Vert. the food was fabulous, one of the better limited menus i've seen in a while. Debs and i opted to split raw oysters and an amazing salad w/goat cheese and smoked salmon which were fantastic and they also had options of lobster bisque and crabcake which Gohm got and i liked too. Entrees i ordered cod (i think) which was very good and Gohm got filet mignon w/fois grais (did i spell that right?). his was very good. overall i had a great time w/the people i was w/ w/o being overwhelmed and an amazing meal on top of it so i loved it.

plus, this was the 1st new year's where i had a designated new year's kiss. very memorable and romantic.

this is Debs' slutty New Year's balloon. it got w/everybody that night.

sometimes

sometimes i feel like a participant in a contest that i'm almost sure i'm going to lose but that i stay in anyways b/c, for some inexplicable reason, i still have hope that i'll win somehow.