Last night, Kimo and I went out to dinner (a Mali Zub-less dinner, mind you) at Black Cat, a new local restaurant. We were looking forward to it because:
1. It had gotten a great review in the local paper,
2. It was our first baby-free, date-night in almost two months,
3. It reminded me of Emir Kusturica's film, Black Cat, White Cat. (Emir Kusturica is one of my favorite directors.)
So anyway, we really wanted to like the place, in part because it was owned by a local guy we wanted to support. But the problem was that the place was just too stuffy. From the college-aged waitstaff putting on airs to the endless replacing of silverware, to the interminable wait between courses. Kimo got the tasting menu, which just about killed us (both in cost and time). By the time the final course rolled around, we were already half an hour late for the babysitter, and we had to ask for the bill before shoveling down a few bites of dessert and bolting out the door.
The food was pretty good, though, especially a beet and mache salad. But the problem for me is that it was really meat-heavy (in that oxtail kind of way). I know, you'd probably think that Peasant People would be staunch meat eaters, but, I've got to admit, there's just something about pork belly that really turns my stomach.
And that, I've decided, is the problem with some of these new-fangled chi-chi restaurants: too much meat. Frasca, an even hoity-toitier local restaurant, was the same way when we ate there. Kimo, meat-eater that he is, was in seventh-heaven, but I just remember eating some weird kind of corn-chowder and thinking, This is the best you can do for us frigging vegetarians?
Not that I'm an all-out vegetarian. I'm just looking for something besides oxtail and buffalo. Ugh.