That's (not) amore!

For those of you still reading, don't worry, I'll return to writing about food soon (mere paragraphs away!). But once a girl declares war on dating, she can't back down. But, instead of dwelling on the fact that after my last post, yes, already after having declared war on dating (a mere eight days later) I was stood up on a date, I must carefully strategize on how to successfully write a blog on food and love without totally abandoning one and indulging overly in another... And strategize on how to not to sound bitter in two posts in a row. The most criminal thing about the evening-that-shall-not-be-named is that my dinner--in preparation for my date-dinner (incidentally at someplace I've already blogged about)--consisted of three appetite-saving soy nuggets and a bowl of edamame. It was truly the meal of jilted lovers (before they even knew they were to be jilted).

However, to navigate through these troubling culinary times (criticizing soy nuggets I imagine inherently is a detriment to an amateur food critic's bona fides), one can legitimately and should therapeutically take consolation in memories of the gastronomical past. And create those in the present. For example, Target sells tri-color gnocchi from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy (where I got kissed post-espresso) and I ate some tonight. I can't imagine what my soulmate from Bologna would think about my $3 purchase, but he didn't get stood up on Friday, did he?


So, I'm back to cooking, somewhat. You may notice that the basil went straight from the pot on my table to be ripped up in the kitchen, returning to the table integrated into my gnocchi. Sustainable agriculture, yes?

So, let's go back in time to when a young innocent girl's only romantic troubles were with the creepy Bologna restaurant owner she didn't know she'd be kissed by. Circa April 2009, I visited Italy to see my brother, the aforementioned brother who dines well and adventurously. It wasn't crazy... I didn't dine on horse or copious amounts of calamari, but I had 34,309 delicious grams of carbohydrates throughout the week and will recount my delights below. I just bought the Maria Callas version of La Traviata on ITunes, so if I try to make out with you while you're reading, that's why. I know making jokes about jokes I myself made probably gets old, but my double shot of soy foods on a Friday night buys me some humor latitude, right?

Our story begins with two siblings, both alike in dignity, In fair Roma, where we lay our scene. After grabbing my first gelato (coconut), I met my star-cross'd brother in front of the Pantheon. My brother gave me explicit guidance to not stand out as an American, and wandered up to me with an OU hat and shirt, flip flops, and a plastic bottle in-hand for his Big Red spittle. Bella Roma. Then my dear brother and I wandered through the alleyways catching up and found our lovely hotel.

It was adorable. The double-paned windows were not super useful when it was so hot we had to keep the windows open anyway and listen to night-time revelers.

After dropping off our luggage pre-check-in, we went to a nearby restaurant listed in my Lonely Planet book. While unrecommendable because of the steep prices, it was extremely notable in the good service that allowed my brother and I to catch up.


Justin got his Caprese salad, I got my melon and proscuitto. He didn't even mind too much I was embarassing him taking pictures every 20 minutes.

Somehow he got outraged, but I'm not sure if I was photographing his outrage of his delicious mushroom pasta. Ok, I'll be fair, he was much calmer over his plate of mozarella, tomato, and basil minutes before:


Later that evening, we met up with Justin's charming friend, Aurelio, who took us to a fabulous pizza place. I'll readily admit I was so overwhelmed with the language, meandering streets, and throng of people outside the restaurant that I don't recall the name, but it was beautiful. Aurelio was admirably enterprising. Despite the throng, Aurelio boldly entered, asked the host the owner's name (Carlo), found Carlo, asked Carlo if he remembered him, and after Carlo's pressured/uncertain acquiescence, we got our table seven minutes later. I'd never seen any Mediterranean waiter work harder, more quickly, or more sarcastically (despite the language barrier) than ours. With Carlo and our waiter at the forefront, it was a feat of good taste and good service.

And gigantic Peroni bottles.

And amiable proprietors named Carlo.

I was too staid to want to embarrass my brother in front of sophisticated Romans (Aurelio brough his friend), so I didn't take photos of our beautiful meal. The best thing I had in Rome was fried fiori di zucca (which I tried for the first time that night), or lightly fried zucchini flowers. It was the equivalent of having the poultry breast of one of those bluebirds from a Disney movie. It was too delicate to eat, but somehow it was done in a way where you didn't feel the least bit guilty, although perhaps less inclined to make good analogies. The pizza was fabulous too...it had egg yolk and other things on it, but the egg yolk was like eating Italian sunshine. Then we went to a bar in Campo de Fiori and ran into people from Oklahoma and Sweden and witnessed Italians playing beer pong. Renaissance art, Italians can do; beer pong is something best left to Americans in converted garages in college towns throughout the Midwest.

Our bar was called the Drunken Ship.. nautical!

The next day, after Justin and I dined in the basement of our hotel (I had nutella, capuccino, and other less memorably delicious items), Aurelio picked us up for a ride around town. A man of my own heart, he drove us around a bit, showed us the Vatican from a beautiful vista, and took us to a beautiful Sicilian bakery. I regret I wasn't more aggressively photographical, but a girl has to take a break. Thankfully, Aurelio caught me mid-bite of a delicious cannoli di ricotta siciliani (Sicilian style cannoli). It was heaven: ricotta cheese filling, studded with dried fruits.

We saw different angles of Rome, caught a beautiful view from above, learned about Guiseppi Garibaldi, and then happily ate again. We went to a beautiful neighborhood, Trastevere, the oldest neighborhood in Rome. It was charming and we dined with Aurelio and his charming girlfriend, Genny.

We got more fried zucchini flowers and four dishes of pasta. We rotated our al dente pasta, cheese-covered plates. It was overwhelming. We delivered our kisses to the couple, went to the train station, and headed up north.

The next day, Justin went to work and I went to Bologna. I detailed my culinary/amorous adventures the day after, but there was much more than extra-marital La Traviata-listening to Bologna. There were the smells and the markets and the artisinal pastas and the fountains and the window arrangements.

This was my first meal in Bologna, enjoyed sitting on a sidewalk on the main piazza looking at this building:


Then, I fell in love before Emanuele fell in love with me. I was captivated by the modest desserts:

I was enraptured by the complicated artisinal pastas (ravioli and tortellini):

And the pasta was so hot, it steamed up its own windows:


To shake my affection for these new culinary loves--that couldn't join me on my trans-Atlantic flight and subsequent foray through Customs--I climbed a tower. The one on the right:


And photographed myself, of course.


And I just found a picture of Emanuele. I don't feel so bad anymore.

After I had "the meal," and was walking around drunkish with "the rose," this seemed awesome:

And buying pumpkin tortellini from this store seemed imperative:

And photographing Italian versions of fem-bots was entirely enjoyable:

And restaurants with entire storefronts dedicated to fungus seemed remarkable (although sort of Miss Haversham-ish):

Then Cinderella hopped in her TrenItalia regional coach, rose and ravioli in-hand, and made her way back to her hamlet in Vicenza to boil up some dinner.

The next day (yes, we're on day three, I'll speed it up), Justin got promoted to 1LT in Vicenza. That night we went out for dinner with his buddy, and had pizza which looked like this (aka awesome).


We all ordered sorbettos, or delicious shot glasses full of icy, lemony, creamy something that presumably had alcohol.

The next day, I sought to go to Ravenna, one of the most artistically significant cities for Byzantine art and the only place I really wanted to see. I woke up late, got on the train, that train ran late, got on another train, didn't press the button hard enough to open the door at my stop so watched the stop go by while still in the accursed train and ended up in Faenza. For the next two hours I was in this forsaken town because the bus to Ravenna didn't arrive until two hours later. So, I had some obscenely sweet gelato and went here:

And saw this:

And this:

And tried to pose angry in front of South Asian pottery. I don't look it, but I was pretty upset. Really.

The bus came and I went to Ravenna. I don't think I thought about food once. It was all love manifest through the lens of my camera: love for mosaic. Just imagine:





It was beautiful, really breathtaking. I rushed back to the train station to try to catch an earlier train so I might get back before 11 pm, realized I was stuck with my thrice-transfer itinerary, and settled down with a McDonald's parmiagiano-reggiano burger (it took me a least two times to get the cashier to understand I wanted a burger). This burger rivaled even the mosaics of Ravenna in beauty.

I hope I don't get stood up on a date again because these therapeutic food-memory-dredging posts seem a bit laborious for us all. The next day, I stayed in Vicenza and after meandering (happily to a museum full of Russian icons in a private collection), I had lunch. I went to a place within view of Justin's appartment, a delightful local place where I conducted my entire meal-ordering in Italian. And it was one of the best meals all week.

The bread was delicious, and I sat in the loft area, closer to the slanted copper-paneled ceiling.

Then I had a delightful appetizer of warmed artichoke shreds with parmesan cheese on top.


Then I had house-man gnocchi with asparagus.

And this is a little cake with fresh fruit and creme inside that was somehow called foccacia.

My final night, Justin and I attended a USO-sponsored Toby Keith concert and it was the most suprising, welcome end to a European meander. The football field where he set up his stage was teeming with cowboys, families and soldiers and surprisingly, a few guitar twangs made me ready to go home.

But only after a most satiating meal:

And after posing with a most beloved brother. Ciao amore!

The Whole "Searching for a Good Man..." Part

If you are new to the blog, don't read this post first. I don't think it will reflect well on either of us. However, instead of recording the bitter rantings of a serial dater, I seek to lay out an explicit case of why the quality of a meal is indirectly proportionate to the number of date offers one could receive. I write this post a bit boldly, but thankfully at one time in the past I clearly defined my audience: anyone who I haven't dated. This is why I can post a picture of an ex-boyfriend with my father's head on top or criticize the Diet Coke proclivities of another. This is also why I don't feel guilty ratting out a guy who I went on a date with on Monday. If I can declare war on an Arlington restaurant, I can declare war on dating, and at least launch a little volley at a guy whom I told about my food blog ("food blog"not nexus/love/food blog/don't-mess-up-or-I'll-publicly-humiliate-you-blog) but avoided passing the link to.

I write to present two different scenarios, to present a case study of dating, from this Monday to this Thursday evening. Imagine, if you will, an eager young dater, surprised to see that men in this age can be aggressive, without being creepy, can time their dinner invitations well, can accept challenges to "dare to find someplace exotic enough for her" (my words, and he chose a Himalayan place), and can both pick her up and drop her off in front of her door. He even avoided doing anything egregious enough to be made fun of about in the first paragraph. I tried, for a whole two minutes, to at least think of something to at least fib a bit about on any of his criminal dating behavior during our dinner. But, he opened doors, pitied mine and my shoes' forays into muddy sidewalk pits, bought my dinner, and remembered biographical details. I gave him postcards from my travels, complimented his demeanor, suggested another date. It was textbook good. I'm not bitter here; these are all facts.

Imagine an entirely different scenario, of a girl after work, say attending a friend's birthday party at a local restaurant. She stuffs stale chips into her mouth, makes loud jokes, obnoxiously does research to determine whose definition of "pashmina" is more correct, and openly makes fun of the guy across the table who talks about his abusive family, how he quit his job, and how he wants to attend Catholic confession because they have booths. She also sits next to an old friend, to whom she doesn't pay that particular of attention to, but whose company she casually enjoys while she consumes 17 chips/minute.

I ask you: in which situation does the girl secure an invitation to a (an additional) date? In which situation does she receive proposals to go to, say, the best Italian restaurant in Georgetown or a request to go out this week (remember, one of these scenarios takes place on a Thursday, so there's not much this-week left)?

I'll tell you, dear reader. Chip eating, onion-breath-smelling, pony-tail wearing datee gets two date offers in one night. One, openly requested at a table of eight people. Eight. "No, I don't have a card." "Yes, I like Italian food." "Yes, that's the best way to reach me." Then another request, 10 minutes later. With scenario number one, our hapless heroine gets her proposed (yes, her proposed date idea) deferred. A certain protagonist male dater deferred his decision to acquiesce to a date, now about 2.5 days away. There is a stay upon my date proposal; a moratorium, if you will, on providing a response in a timely fashion. I'm being foolish and bold, unsophisticatedly insulting semi-hapless, but mostly well-meaning men who put some element of their soul on the line to betray some emotion. If any of these dates go well, I'll delete this post.

But, did I miss a memo? Is it true that if you eshew decorum and abandon dating rules (following up with a second date proposal yourself, as the girl that you might be), you end up blogging alone on a Thursday night about the date that has evaporated before it became a discussable idea on Sunday? Is it true, in a parallel fashion, that if you openly admit to a table of eight you are unmarried, yes, single, and yes, without a boyfriend (as I may have been asked tonight at the table of eight), with no intention of securing any Sunday dates, that 50% of the men at your dinner table flock to you with dinner invitations? Does Ray run Ray's Dates, too, and is he behind the inexplicable customer service I'm experiencing? Can I speak to a manager?

Ray's the Pitchforks

Moral of this story: Don't mess with a girl from Kansas City who knows her steak and has an amateur hobby as a food writer.

I've toyed with outrage on my blog, and I'd like to say I've dropped some serious money as a solo diner at some restaurants. I've ordered my three courses, endured obnoxious waiters, entertained their mildly uninformed conversation hinting at the freakishness of a solo diner, and suffered through painfully executed orders of multiple courses. But I'd like to state that I've never been so affronted as a diner--and a vocal diner expressing a restaurant's shortcomings to its managers--as this evening at a widely respected restaurant, Ray's the Steaks in Arlington.

I will pontificate and then I'll formalize my criticism, for those who might be interested in my self-important tirade. On a more fiscally responsible note, never should a diner spend over $50 on dinner and have a "manager" in an Old Navy sundress lecture a diner (me) on how my table arrived late and ruined two sets of reservations for subsequent tables. Plus I ordered jiggly bone marrow on my steak. May your Old Navy credit card (with its $350 credit limit) spontaneously combust, oh poorly responsive customer service professional.

So, for pontification. Serving steak is a sacrosanct responsibility. Like Mormonism is our country's original religion, steak is our national food pastime. Burgers are its crude derivative. Chicken pot pie can be served in a can. But serving an American steak is something you should have a license for and you should be deported to somewhere like Antarctica (where you can't possibly mess up a steak's preparation) if you foul it up. Furthermore, steak is like tiered cakes: they are served at special occasions and their administration shouldn't be trifled with. This evening was my friend Mike's going-away dinner. I didn't play this card with Ms. Eggplant-colored sack-dress wearer, but I should have, if I could have put a coherent word in edgewise.

So, I say to those who want to fully commodify the selling of steaks: be warned. More formally, you have an audience celebrating something special (tonight, Mike's departure) and you can't rush the degustation of a steak. Even though you, wait service staff, are all under 25 and want to make out with each other as soon as the last table is gone. And I can say this because I worked at a steak restaurant that sold $5 filet mignons. And even at Santa Fe Cattle Company steakhouse in Oklahoma, with diners who had no teeth and left "generous" $1.50 tips and drank sweet tea, our kind management let them enjoy their moment of fame eating beef cuts with no bones in it.

So, (for the third didactical paragraph beginning with so), don't rush my and my friends' steak-eating, because this is America, ok? And far from the friendly folk who raised that cow that became your steak anyway. Go buy a sundress that fits.

So what happened, besides some egregious sporting of sundress? We arrived at Ray's the Steaks, a fine restaurant in Arlington, to the ambivalent looks of three girls who must have had a rough day in wood shop at the local high school. As Mike and I sauntered up (you will note that the noun and pronoun pairing suggests that there were two of us), these devlishly clever girls asked if our entire party was present. After wondering why they would need confirmation (that they weren't) when there was not a soul behind us, we said no, and they let us know that it would be possible to seat us, expressing through their body language and tone how lucky we were to be seated despite it being such an imposition, despite the scores of empty tables.

We should have left the restaurant then. I thought I abandoned interactions with petulant pre-pubescents when I graduated Catholic school in 8th grade. Mike and I ordered wine (I guess I shouldn't have specified we wanted the "$18 dollar bottle of wine" instead of the "Argentinian Malbec") and sat and waited for the rest of our delightful company. Our waitress, despite her likely Old-Navy derived ill-fitting sweater, was tolerable enough. And I mean in that in the meanest of Mr. Darcy-type tones.

We ordered salads and soup. All of us. We didn't pull college-sophomore-night-out-on-the-town and order one appetizer for all. We also entertained our waitress when she looked at Kerry's (dear, loyal reader Kerry's) white table cloth space before her and asked if she had received her soup. Dear Kerry had ordered lobster bisque--a striking color difference to the white of the table cloth--so even daft waitress should have known the color family of reds and pinks based on her sweater color choice.

My salad, at a time when I would have considered re-patronizing Ray's the Steaks.

Even before, however, our waitress led us down an Alice in Wonderland hole of main-dish-explanation confusion. I admit, as a food writer, I should know what steak "al diablo" means. Probably devil, hot, red, spicy, something. Bad-ponytailed pink cardigan (this is war) says: "oh, it's spicy." Oh fabulous, a useful waitress. "What makes it spicy?" I ask. "Is it red pepper flakes or something encrusted on top?" Flaky foundation-wearer says, "It's got garlic and salt on it." Oh, I must have assumed it was spicy and thankfully she's correcting me, I think to myself. After helpful consultations with co-diners, I realize I had the most unmeaningful conversation with a waitress, who effectively led me to believe two different things without me even realizing it. The mind games had already begun.

But, our waitress didn't realize who she was messing with: an amateur food writer; to her left, a sophisticated food palate with excellent taste in her choice of food-blog reading; to her right, another avid food-blog reader and an excellent judge of character and service; and across from her, a Greek (what better judge of food) who hails from a family of restaurant owners. We're well-dressed, well-empoloyed, have job security, and aren't to be trifled with.

We got our steaks; they were good. But really? I've had steaks all over this fine country. For a while, I wouldn't eat anything but filet mignon at fine restaurants. While a filet could come from the ankle of a cow for all I know, I do know that it's served with a certain panache, respect, and deference to both the diners being served and more abstractly, to commemorate the event for which the diner enters into the restaurant in the first place. It could be to celebrate a promotion, a departure, or the stellar platinum-blonde dye-job of your mistress, but it's an event that deserves attention, by exemplary service and patient wait staff.

I ordered bone marrow on my steak. Again, don't rush me, 80s mini-sweater wearer with accompanying minions of four-foot tall wait staff. My bone marrow jiggled and I wear boots on Fridays. I didn't order marinated portabello mushrooms and my pansy-assed former steakhouse manager could probably beat up your inattentive, overly-solicitous front of house manager. And I'm fairly certain that the ex-con looking bald steak-griller at my former employer would have grilled managers who wore cotton body concealers in their role as the face of the restaurant. Concluding my second tirade, I note that my local steakhouse in the Midwest could out arm-wrestle Ray's the Steaks, if Ray's the Steaks un-snootied itself and left its comfortable DC suburb.

Bone Marrow looks like animal fat without the chewiness of fat. How convenient.

Then the Cold War began. I ate slow in the run-up, and didn't feel pressured to eat fast. I had seconds of creamed spinach, had another piece of bread, ate a bit more steak, whose ribbons of fat had started to congeal. I can say these things out of reverence for steak.

We got our dessert, fine enough, then the assault began. Our helpful waitress, with her unbecoming scowl (developing in intensity but devolving in sophistication) brought us "tiger butter." First, when did fancy restaurants start adopting food name titles more appropriate for Applebee's kids' menus? I digress. She placed down a plate of sophisticated-enough post-dinner amuse-bouches and said (like she were setting down a plate of run-of-the-mill flapjacks with I Can't Believe Its Not Butter packets), "This it tiger butter. We give it to everyone."


We were flattered to know that our waitress deigned to pass on what usually is standard and to acquiesce to its provision to our table. Then she put the check down. And three subsequent employees asked if we were ready to pay. And the extra place setting that had sat there during dinner was removed, after an employee asked if that person had come yet (yes, we ate him already). Then waiters hovered, refilling glasses and listening to conversations, and repeatedly trying to take our dessert plates. I tried to order espresso after all this (deliberately provocative), got a dismissive "We don't have that. Only coffee and de-caf" without a glimmer of eye-contact, and never received any coffee-bean derivative.

It was egregious: hassling service, unresponsive wait staff, explicit pressure to abandon our table, despite not yet having finished the dregs of our second bottle of wine. In my Malbec-inspired boldness, I asked sundress if I could speak to the manager. She smugly said she was it. This I doubt. She may have gotten an A in Home Ec her sophomore year, but I also thought clothing choice was part of this curriculum as well.

Anyway, I boldly asserted we felt pressure during our dinner to quit our table, felt the wait staff was hovering, were unimpressed with the service from the moment we stepped in, and I said I wouldn't come back because of it. Nicely and cordially, I think, for all of that.

My snippy interlocutor noted that we were late in arriving, bumped back two tables for their reservations, and that their wait staff was indeed pressuring us to leave. I noted that we were pressured by multiple employees who only appeared at the end of our meal to provide us "service," and she noted that she was sorry I didn't appreciate Ray's the Steak's regimen of employing "team service." That was the end of it. I laughed out loud when she left (within her earshot), probably deriding the seriousness I tried to imply in my frustration while attempting to deliver a serious indictment of the restaurant's service, but her lack of customer service skills, provision of an ear to attempt to understand my concerns as a diner, and aggressive dimissiveness were appalling.

What's more frustrating is that I fear droves of "enlightened" diners will continue to patronize the restaurant, reveling in its "innovative menu," enjoying the poor treatment they receive at the hands of the waitstaff sacrificially for such an "excellent steak," and recommending it as a hip alternative if going into DC doesn't suit. I say flying to the Midwest, ordering a steak from a woman who wears a toolbelt for a notepad holder, and ordering a toothpick instead of an espresso at the end of your dinner is more worth your time. I've posted my review to washingtonpost.com and hope my budding signs of restaurant activism contribute to the downfall of what could have been a recommendable dining experience (sorry for self-righteousness). But, we had a fabulous time, enjoyed our tiger butter and good company and conversation, and saw Mike off as sincerely as good friends can.