Monday, November 3, 2008

Happy Birthday Kristal

Kristal's birthday was this past Saturday. We had a full day of fun.

First, Kristal woke up to this on the kitchen table:


Kristal was very anxious to get after the gifts, but we made her wait until after Miles' Famous Pancake Breakfast (I made some bacon to go along).


We got one last parting shot of the gifts...


Then let Kris dig in!





No, I didn't give her a box of Tylenol:


I had to hide some product I bought her in a box so she wouldn't get wise... :-)

After breakfast and gifts, we lounged around the house for a while, then got ready to go to a family concert at Carnegie Hall. It was called Berstein Beat, and was hosted by Leonard Berstein's daughter. They played a lot of music from West Side Story. The boys loved it!




We all had a great time.

We drove home, and had a couple more hours to kill, then Kristal and I got dressed up to go to Le Cirque, a really fancy and famous restaurant in New York City. It's one of the few restaurants I've ever been do that had a dress code -- jackets required for gentlemen.



Picking things off the menu wasn't easy. Being French, we had our choice of the usual things: Escargot, Foi Gras, frog legs, etc etc. for appetizers. We settled in on shrimp for Kristal, and I had a special, off-menu item, risotto with white truffle shaved table-side. He brought our appetizers out, and indeed, shaved a grand amount of white truffle onto my risotto. It was great!

We then moved on to main courses, which, I'll just summarize -- were disappointing. Nearly every choice was fatty and Kristal's pork dish was very fatty. I ordered a duck confit, which I've been on a kick of, but it was all modern and "deconstructed" and frankly, not as good as on-bone duck confit I've had lately.

Kristal had creme brulee for desert, and I had a chocolate mousse. Overall, the food was ok, not great. But the service in the place was unreal. So many waitstaff, bustling around, clearing this, bringing that...it was amazing.

Despite all Le Cirque had to offer, I nearly had a heart attack when the bill came. I was literally sick to my stomach most of the night afterwards. I paid more in tip than it costs me to feed my whole family at some places. It was a great and memory-filled birthday for Kristal, though, and we couldn't have rung in her 30th with anything better.



1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hey, your only 30 once. Enjoy life while you can.

Dad