Monday, April 18, 2005
A failed foray into nouveau cuisine
It was my sister’s boyfriend’s birthday yesterday. In my family, birthdays are celebrated over dinner, sometimes at my parents’ house, and sometimes at the restaurant of the birthday-haver’s choosing. Lala and her boyfriend, Shane, have been together for almost ten years. No, they’re not married – that’s another story for another day.
However, having been together for so long, they have moved into the yuppie phase of their lives. Some people are destined to be yuppies, some of us are not. I don’t think anyone could ever classify me as a yuppie. I’m no longer “young”, for the first, nor am I all that “upwardly mobile”. I mean, I have a reasonable job. I like it because it’s flexible and I can pretty much set my own hours as long as I get my stuff done, in order to avoid having people yell at me. I probably won’t ever get fired. Lala and Shane are young and upwardly mobile, and they give off that impression when you talk to them, see their house, etc.
Lala and Shane like to dine out, as well. Sure, Lala cooks. She’s one of those no-fat people. Beautiful, but no butter, no ice cream. She makes cookies with no butter and reduced sugar, and adds in raisins and cranberries and all those sorts of things that are supposed to be healthy. I, on the other hand, cannot eat raisins and cranberries, and I like me some butter with my plain white bread.
Lala and Shane choose nouveau cuisine-type restaurants every single damn time it’s their turn to pick a place to eat. Shit, man. I can’t eat that stuff. We’ve been over that before, more than once. Plus, the restaurant of their choosing, “Muse”, was in Kensington, which is a neighborhood that would try the patience of the Pope, if we had one, and my comment to Rob when we got out of the car (after trying to find a parking space and turning the car around in the middle of the road, piloting it down an alley that was last attended to when I was a small child and whose potholes could probably digest the Tiny Car) was “This place just violates me every time I come here”. He thought that was pretty funny. It’s nice to know I have that sort of support, you know?
We got to the restaurant with an hour to kill (Lala and Shane also like to eat late), thinking we’d maybe sit at the bar and have some drinks or something while we waited. However, the menu was posted on the door to the place. I took a quick look:
“five-spiced duck leg with apple relish confit, reduced truffle essence” As an appetizer.
The menu also contained such phrases as “grainy mustard spetzle”, “rocket aioli”, “truffled popcorn”. What in the fuck is a truffled popcorn? Or a rocket aioli, for that matter?
So I’m not high-class. I never pretended to be.
We went to a little pub across the street and had a drink, and some garlic cheese toast while we waited. I kinda figured I should have eaten something that resembled normal food since that menu didn’t contain anything edible at first glance, but I didn’t, and that was my own mistake. Also, the little pub we were at was pretty much the opposite of the fancy restaurant – their idea of garlic cheese toast was a slice of white bread, cut in half, with a lot of melted cheddar on top and some green stuff (most likely parsley or maybe green onion chopped up really well) thrown in for effect. ONE slice. Not two, or a basket of two or three, but ONE single slice on a small plate. Yeesh. That lonely slice of white bread was a harbinger of doom.
Finally, we made our way back to the restaurant. I shuddered as we entered. We were led to an empty table surrounded by more empty tables. When Lala told me what time we were having dinner, she said it was the only reservation they could get that wasn’t 5p (which would have been FINE with me…). The joint was deserted, and we were the first of our party (consisting of Lala and Shane, my parents and us) to arrive. Rob ordered a beer, and I immediately ordered a scotch. Hey, I’m not high-class, but I can pretend when necessary, can’t I?
We must have read that menu over 500 times. I’m sure I did, anyway, scouring it for some semblance of something I would be able to eat. The regularly-listed soups, for instance, were all off the list since they all contained pretty much vegetable bases. Fine. Same for the salads – I usually don’t have salads. That whole “fruits and vegetables = extreme abdominal pain” thing, you know. The appetizers were baffling and cryptic. The main courses, at first look, assaulted my senses and confused me. I recognized “AAA Tenderloin”, but why would anyone want to molest it with three contradictory sauces? And the Yukon gold potato lasagne with lobster and scallops… maybe… but with American sauce? What is American sauce? Reduced Bob Dole? Oh, and dear god. The prices. Their only beef dish, the AAA Tenderloin with its multitude of strange sauces, was $40. Sorry, maybe this is just me, and the rest of you routinely pay over $30 for one dish of food, but in my world, I could go out and have an entire evening for $40. I’m just sayin’. I feel it’s not quite fair to pick the most expensive restaurant going and expect my dad to pay for my $40 meal by default. That’s just not cool. Sure, there are restaurants where I’d be more than happy to pay $40 for a meal, because I’d be getting exactly what I wanted, done the way I wanted, and I wouldn’t just be settling for something I could tolerate for that price. No way. Uh-unh.
OK. Maybe I’m being bitchy and difficult. The atmosphere was nice. The décor was nice. However, the place gave me the wiggins, and I felt very uncomfortable, and I was hungry. I had been looking forward to a nice dinner. Hell, my lunch was a pizza pop, had at 1p, over five hours earlier.
Having read the menu enough times to know that it contained nothing I could eat, I looked at the “specials” list, and there was a potato and leek soup that looked like it would suffice. I ordered that. I contemplated just giving Shane his birthday present and then running out the door, but Rob thought that might be a bit much, so we stayed. And had as much scotch as I could get the waiter to bring me. It seemed like everyone else had some problems with the menu, too, because four out of the other five people ordered the salmon, which came with spinach and sheep feta cheese risotto, a smoked tomato and some sort of olive reduction paste. I guess the risotto was alright, but Lala didn’t like the olive paste, and I don’t think Rob touched it, but he really liked the smoked tomato. My father, The Grumpaw, ordered veal (I think that’s what it was) accompanied by some sort of tuber – either carrot, sweet potato or possibly a foreign form of squash.
My potato and leek soup, which was bland an inoccuous, came with some sort of purple and white, 1.5”-round cake of the most foul-tasting gelatinous substance known to man. I accidentally touched it trying to get it out of the bowl of soup and then touched my finger to my mouth, and lo, it was horrible. I passed it on my bread-and-butter plate to Rob to see if I was going insane (probably from hunger), and he said it smelled pretty bad, but wouldn’t taste it. Neither would Lala. We all agreed that it was probably a thinly veiled attempt to poison me since I had complained about the menu. The chef must have ears everywhere.
Looking around the internet today, I found a menu from Muse from last year. It seems like it would have been more promising. I probably could have found one thing on that menu I could have eaten. Apparently, they change menus fairly often.
Dessert was birthday cake at my parents’ place after dinner. I opted us out of it because I was starving. Rob and I went and got Chicken On The Way to eat at home afterwards. Chicken On The Way has existed since the beginning of time, I think. It was there when my parents first moved to Calgary over 35 years ago. It was the first place they ate when they got here (ostensibly because they lived in Kensington and it was handy, Calgary being a much smaller place at that time). Chicken On The Way has not only fantastic fried chicken, but they also have the most amazing corn fritters. Little balls of corn-bread-type batter deep fried in the same fat as the chicken. Their fries are abysmally bad, unfortunately, but you don’t need the fries if you have the chicken and the corn fritters. That’s enough fat to cause a whole flock of coronaries right there. For, like, $10, you can get four pieces of chicken and a bunch of corn fritters. I feel it totally rational to compare Chicken On The Way, which has been around for over 35 years, to Muse, which has existed for only a couple, and has burned down during that time and has been rebuilt…
Fried chicken is fattening. I didn’t care. Eating after 9p is fattening, too. I didn’t care that I have been trying to lose weight. I was starving hungry. I have this thing with food, where if I don’t get to eat it when I’m hungry, I get to the point where I can’t actually put it in my mouth, and I can’t eat at all, and then I get a two-day headache from not eating. And I get cranky, which I’m sure Rob could tell you all about. I was well past the point of being hungry, and if I hadn’t eaten that chicken, I would have been in a state today.
So while I survived the experience, just barely, I would not recommend Muse to anyone unless they really like that sort of thing. Restaurants are kind of a personal preference, and if you get the wrong one, it can totally ruin your evening. I’m more of a local eatery kind of gal. I like burgers, and chicken sandwiches, and BLTs, and Italian food, or maybe Mexican food. Sure, add Greek food to the list, I can usually find something I can eat there since it’s mostly meat. I like Spanish food. I can hack Vietnamese food since someone explained it to me. I like seafood. I like steak. I like pork chops. Rice, pasta, bread, potatoes. I’m just a simple girl looking for something that doesn’t contain too many fruits and vegetables.
If you like international or nouveau cuisine, or that fusion type of stuff, then go. Enjoy. It seems like a classy joint. But it’s casual enough that they’ll treat you well even if you show up in casual-wear. I could see it being pretty romantic, as long as you can find something you can eat. Venture out, expand your horizons, good luck with the new experience.
I’ll be at the Chicken On The Way.
However, having been together for so long, they have moved into the yuppie phase of their lives. Some people are destined to be yuppies, some of us are not. I don’t think anyone could ever classify me as a yuppie. I’m no longer “young”, for the first, nor am I all that “upwardly mobile”. I mean, I have a reasonable job. I like it because it’s flexible and I can pretty much set my own hours as long as I get my stuff done, in order to avoid having people yell at me. I probably won’t ever get fired. Lala and Shane are young and upwardly mobile, and they give off that impression when you talk to them, see their house, etc.
Lala and Shane like to dine out, as well. Sure, Lala cooks. She’s one of those no-fat people. Beautiful, but no butter, no ice cream. She makes cookies with no butter and reduced sugar, and adds in raisins and cranberries and all those sorts of things that are supposed to be healthy. I, on the other hand, cannot eat raisins and cranberries, and I like me some butter with my plain white bread.
Lala and Shane choose nouveau cuisine-type restaurants every single damn time it’s their turn to pick a place to eat. Shit, man. I can’t eat that stuff. We’ve been over that before, more than once. Plus, the restaurant of their choosing, “Muse”, was in Kensington, which is a neighborhood that would try the patience of the Pope, if we had one, and my comment to Rob when we got out of the car (after trying to find a parking space and turning the car around in the middle of the road, piloting it down an alley that was last attended to when I was a small child and whose potholes could probably digest the Tiny Car) was “This place just violates me every time I come here”. He thought that was pretty funny. It’s nice to know I have that sort of support, you know?
We got to the restaurant with an hour to kill (Lala and Shane also like to eat late), thinking we’d maybe sit at the bar and have some drinks or something while we waited. However, the menu was posted on the door to the place. I took a quick look:
“five-spiced duck leg with apple relish confit, reduced truffle essence” As an appetizer.
The menu also contained such phrases as “grainy mustard spetzle”, “rocket aioli”, “truffled popcorn”. What in the fuck is a truffled popcorn? Or a rocket aioli, for that matter?
So I’m not high-class. I never pretended to be.
We went to a little pub across the street and had a drink, and some garlic cheese toast while we waited. I kinda figured I should have eaten something that resembled normal food since that menu didn’t contain anything edible at first glance, but I didn’t, and that was my own mistake. Also, the little pub we were at was pretty much the opposite of the fancy restaurant – their idea of garlic cheese toast was a slice of white bread, cut in half, with a lot of melted cheddar on top and some green stuff (most likely parsley or maybe green onion chopped up really well) thrown in for effect. ONE slice. Not two, or a basket of two or three, but ONE single slice on a small plate. Yeesh. That lonely slice of white bread was a harbinger of doom.
Finally, we made our way back to the restaurant. I shuddered as we entered. We were led to an empty table surrounded by more empty tables. When Lala told me what time we were having dinner, she said it was the only reservation they could get that wasn’t 5p (which would have been FINE with me…). The joint was deserted, and we were the first of our party (consisting of Lala and Shane, my parents and us) to arrive. Rob ordered a beer, and I immediately ordered a scotch. Hey, I’m not high-class, but I can pretend when necessary, can’t I?
We must have read that menu over 500 times. I’m sure I did, anyway, scouring it for some semblance of something I would be able to eat. The regularly-listed soups, for instance, were all off the list since they all contained pretty much vegetable bases. Fine. Same for the salads – I usually don’t have salads. That whole “fruits and vegetables = extreme abdominal pain” thing, you know. The appetizers were baffling and cryptic. The main courses, at first look, assaulted my senses and confused me. I recognized “AAA Tenderloin”, but why would anyone want to molest it with three contradictory sauces? And the Yukon gold potato lasagne with lobster and scallops… maybe… but with American sauce? What is American sauce? Reduced Bob Dole? Oh, and dear god. The prices. Their only beef dish, the AAA Tenderloin with its multitude of strange sauces, was $40. Sorry, maybe this is just me, and the rest of you routinely pay over $30 for one dish of food, but in my world, I could go out and have an entire evening for $40. I’m just sayin’. I feel it’s not quite fair to pick the most expensive restaurant going and expect my dad to pay for my $40 meal by default. That’s just not cool. Sure, there are restaurants where I’d be more than happy to pay $40 for a meal, because I’d be getting exactly what I wanted, done the way I wanted, and I wouldn’t just be settling for something I could tolerate for that price. No way. Uh-unh.
OK. Maybe I’m being bitchy and difficult. The atmosphere was nice. The décor was nice. However, the place gave me the wiggins, and I felt very uncomfortable, and I was hungry. I had been looking forward to a nice dinner. Hell, my lunch was a pizza pop, had at 1p, over five hours earlier.
Having read the menu enough times to know that it contained nothing I could eat, I looked at the “specials” list, and there was a potato and leek soup that looked like it would suffice. I ordered that. I contemplated just giving Shane his birthday present and then running out the door, but Rob thought that might be a bit much, so we stayed. And had as much scotch as I could get the waiter to bring me. It seemed like everyone else had some problems with the menu, too, because four out of the other five people ordered the salmon, which came with spinach and sheep feta cheese risotto, a smoked tomato and some sort of olive reduction paste. I guess the risotto was alright, but Lala didn’t like the olive paste, and I don’t think Rob touched it, but he really liked the smoked tomato. My father, The Grumpaw, ordered veal (I think that’s what it was) accompanied by some sort of tuber – either carrot, sweet potato or possibly a foreign form of squash.
My potato and leek soup, which was bland an inoccuous, came with some sort of purple and white, 1.5”-round cake of the most foul-tasting gelatinous substance known to man. I accidentally touched it trying to get it out of the bowl of soup and then touched my finger to my mouth, and lo, it was horrible. I passed it on my bread-and-butter plate to Rob to see if I was going insane (probably from hunger), and he said it smelled pretty bad, but wouldn’t taste it. Neither would Lala. We all agreed that it was probably a thinly veiled attempt to poison me since I had complained about the menu. The chef must have ears everywhere.
Looking around the internet today, I found a menu from Muse from last year. It seems like it would have been more promising. I probably could have found one thing on that menu I could have eaten. Apparently, they change menus fairly often.
Dessert was birthday cake at my parents’ place after dinner. I opted us out of it because I was starving. Rob and I went and got Chicken On The Way to eat at home afterwards. Chicken On The Way has existed since the beginning of time, I think. It was there when my parents first moved to Calgary over 35 years ago. It was the first place they ate when they got here (ostensibly because they lived in Kensington and it was handy, Calgary being a much smaller place at that time). Chicken On The Way has not only fantastic fried chicken, but they also have the most amazing corn fritters. Little balls of corn-bread-type batter deep fried in the same fat as the chicken. Their fries are abysmally bad, unfortunately, but you don’t need the fries if you have the chicken and the corn fritters. That’s enough fat to cause a whole flock of coronaries right there. For, like, $10, you can get four pieces of chicken and a bunch of corn fritters. I feel it totally rational to compare Chicken On The Way, which has been around for over 35 years, to Muse, which has existed for only a couple, and has burned down during that time and has been rebuilt…
Fried chicken is fattening. I didn’t care. Eating after 9p is fattening, too. I didn’t care that I have been trying to lose weight. I was starving hungry. I have this thing with food, where if I don’t get to eat it when I’m hungry, I get to the point where I can’t actually put it in my mouth, and I can’t eat at all, and then I get a two-day headache from not eating. And I get cranky, which I’m sure Rob could tell you all about. I was well past the point of being hungry, and if I hadn’t eaten that chicken, I would have been in a state today.
So while I survived the experience, just barely, I would not recommend Muse to anyone unless they really like that sort of thing. Restaurants are kind of a personal preference, and if you get the wrong one, it can totally ruin your evening. I’m more of a local eatery kind of gal. I like burgers, and chicken sandwiches, and BLTs, and Italian food, or maybe Mexican food. Sure, add Greek food to the list, I can usually find something I can eat there since it’s mostly meat. I like Spanish food. I can hack Vietnamese food since someone explained it to me. I like seafood. I like steak. I like pork chops. Rice, pasta, bread, potatoes. I’m just a simple girl looking for something that doesn’t contain too many fruits and vegetables.
If you like international or nouveau cuisine, or that fusion type of stuff, then go. Enjoy. It seems like a classy joint. But it’s casual enough that they’ll treat you well even if you show up in casual-wear. I could see it being pretty romantic, as long as you can find something you can eat. Venture out, expand your horizons, good luck with the new experience.
I’ll be at the Chicken On The Way.
