Excuse: I stink!

This weekend has been long and yet at times relaxing. It started Friday evening when we went to The Stinking Rose and then took a tour around the city via Equinox, meant to dance at Milagros but ended up elsewhere making our servers find out their fortune...in bed. Finally, Sunday was a day of mostly inspiring reading but also some purge cleaning.

Thursday I saw the movie Tsotsi, and I decided I liked it so much I had to get the soundtrack, plus while I was at it the soundtrack to Shortbus, a movie I like more the more I think about it (the bonus stuff on the dvd was really interesting, and helped me like the movie more.) I also got an album by Mika (Life in Cartoon Motion), which was recommended on the Shortbus website. So I'm really liking all my new music, plus the Tsotsi dvd had a cool music video on it so I tried my hand at ripping one track to an iPod sized video using CloneDVDMobile and it seems to have come out great!

Friday was The Stinking Rose. I wanted to go there because it's famous. Any time you read an article on garlic in a food or gourmet magazine or a book talks about it, it's always "there is even a restaurant where everything has garlic in it, even the icecream!" and they are referring to The Stinking Rose. It didn't get very good reviews on Yelp, so I was prepared to not like it very much, so I would have to say it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be! The restaurant is rather pretty, especially on the outside - I guess it has to be, to be in North Beach and entice people away from all the other gorgeous-on-the-outside restaurants there. We ordered the roasted garlic cloves in olive oil and butter (Bagna Calda) to start and it was delicious on our bread (and everything else I put it on, much to the amusement/alarm of my bf) and then the Garlic Swiss Chard Fontina Fondue as an appetizer. The menu isn't very vegetarian friendly, so we then just split the Garlic Gorgonzola Neon Ravioli. My bf isn't vegetarian, so I guess he could have gotten Midwestern Corn Fed Beef with Garlic Mashed Potatoes (um, corn fed? why would someone brag about that? isn't that kind of the default? Now, if it was grass-fed, free-range, that would be something to brag about...but don't get me started with big agribusiness and government subsidy ranting!) but it's nice to split dishes so we don't end up wasting so much food.

The wine tasted like it was watered down, but we each had two glasses anyway. We didn't eat dessert there because the only garlic dessert was the icecream, and the icecream was from Gilroy, and we were in Gilroy last week eating garlic icecream which (false advertising!!!) is actually made in Santa Cruz. So we started wandering up and down the street looking for a dessert place. The people watching was fun (and nice revenge for being watched ourselves through the window of the Stinking Rose) but eventually we decided we'd rather go to Equinox, the revolving restaurant at the top of the Hyatt Regency.

At Equinox, we ordered some dessert I don't even remember clearly along with a couple glasses of port, which I am not usually a big fan of, but for once the sweetness of it was tasty. Maybe that's what happens after you eat a pound of garlic. As we were eating our non-memorable dessert, we noticed a lime wedge on the window ledge. The seating area of the restaurant is always turning in a big circle, but the center and the windows remain in place. So this lime wedge started heading towards us. Then we saw a strawberry with a grape on top of it coming 'round the bend, so my bf gave me a blueberry and I put that on top of the grape (since I was closer to it). Then, more lime wedges came around and eventually a wine cork with a butter ball on top. My naughty bf handed me a sprig of mint from our dessert and I garnished the butterball with it and we collapsed with laughter. After that more stuff came around...eventually messages on napkin pieces..."Help", "SOS" and finally "I need money!" Then...nothing. So, we had some irish coffees and left. Without the view and some amusing mystery people putting stuff on the window ledge, it would have been a pretty boring restaurant.

Saturday we were planning to go to our salsa instructor's dance fieldtrip at Milagros for Cinco de Mayo. However, Saturday wasn't just Cinco de Mayo, it was also the day of some big boxing match with Oscar De La Hoya. Not being a boxing fan, the guy to me is just a way to remember how to order my beans without lard en espanol, but hundreds of rowdy, drunken Milagros patrons seem to think otherwise. Even my bf; since he didn't get to watch the fight he's getting it on PPV next weekend.

Since Milagros was ablsolutely packed with drunk revelers and we didn't think it would be very easy to salsa to the mariachi band playing La Cucaracha and the service is usually bad there anyway, we decided to go to what is normally our Monday night restaurant, A Tavola. We sat at the bar and ordered wine and appetizers, and it would have felt just like a Monday night except it was a different bartender. We asked her why they weren't showing the fight, and she said "maybe because it's our last night". What????? It seems A Tavola is closing and then "remodelling" to become part of Milagros. Wahhhhh! But A Tavola has better food, better wine, better service and better decor! Life is so not fair! The only good part is that at least we got to be there on their last night.

Lately we have been - well okay, *I* have been - carrying around fortune cookies so we can read them after our meals. Our chances of being in a chinese, vietnamese, tiki bar or other fortune-cookie-serving restaurant are pretty small, so we have to bring our own little nuggets of future-divulging goodness. It's pretty fun, and lucky for us when we give one to our server and my bf says "and you have to play the in-bed game", they actually know what he is talking about. At least they have so far. The bartender at A Tavola was cool about it and so was the woman at Savvy Cellar, where we went next since Milagros was still totally packed with drunken revellers.

At Savvy Cellar, at least we look familiar to them I think. So when we called behind the bar from my cel phone and asked for one particular server to come over to give her a fortune cookie, she wasn't too like "omg, I think these people are crazy stalkers". In fact, she read her fortune to all I dunno...ten people in the place? So that's cool. Oh, and the wine...that place has amazing wine...really, really it does. I may start getting wine there for home use instead of BevMo or (hahaha) Grocery Outlet.

I may have broken some rule about how long a blog post should be, so let me just (wheeeee) slide on over to Sunday here and say that it was a very productive "idea" day. I've been reading a book that just came out that is called something like "The Four Hour Work Week", and it has some great ideas about efficiency and thinking outside the box and I found it very inspiring both business-wise and cleaning-my-patio-wise. And...that's all for now. Time to get ready for the gym and then ready for the arrival (finally) of the Rabbit Hutch! Then...what will happen after class tonight? No Monday night A Tavola! Wahhhhh!