2 December: Restaurant moment. Share the best restaurant experience you had this year. Who was there? What made it amazing? What taste stands out in your mind?
Let's remember that on most days of the year I am a vegan. I qualify it with "on most days of the year" not because I eat turkey on Thanksgiving or sneak bacon bits on my baked potatoes, but because, honestly, sometimes I just say, "fuck it" and I eat the cheese if I'm stuck in a city far from anywhere reasonable and there truly is nothing else to eat.
You may all revoke my vegan license now, if you must. I'll absolutely still love you. I always have. I always will.
Now, remembering that I am a vegan on most days of the year, I think we can all have a good laugh that my best restaurant experience I had this year took place at Don Shula's Steak House in Chicago. Yes, that's correct. A steak house. Where the menu is written on a fucking football. Where they parade huge slabs of practically still mooing cow around on a cart to entice you to order them. It is almost as exciting as choosing your very own lobster from a tank, only not quite. Because, well, the cow is dead. Not actually mooing. Imagine if they did parade the actual cows through the dining hall and asked you to choose the one your table wanted to chop and share for dinner? I wonder if that might increase the numbers of vegetarians in this world?
Oh, but back to dinner. I'm supposed to be talking about the "best" restaurant experience of 2009 and I'm sure by now you all are recoiled in horror and wondering what could possibly have been best about this experience by any stretch of the imagination?
It was not the beef. It wasn't even the football, although I will attest that I was talking about that football menu months later so it definitely made a lasting, if not finest, impression.
No, in this case, it was all about the excellent company.
I was in Chicago this summer, as previously mentioned, for Blogher. And after finding the esteemed Grace Davis in a room crowded with Mommy Bloggers and squealing so loudly that I think we burst every ear drum within the confines of those four walls, eventually we found our way to the only open restaurant in the entire hotel. Mr. Shula's.
We were joined at the table by my dear friend, Michelle, of Everyday Celebrating, the drop dead gorgeous and sexy Sarah Dopp, and my blogging twin, the ever beautiful Elke of Elkit in Wonderland. I squished myself into the corner of the booth and just basked in the glow of all that amazing womanhood and let the conversation flow over me.
It was, in one word, fantabulous. It was a dinner filled with love, admiration, girl talk, inside blogging gossip, flirtations and, well, I just found myself falling head over heels in love all over again with all of those women and the words, THE WORDS, that they all write with such honest conviction, the words that brought all of us together.
Our blogs are our bond. But that night, that dinner forged an even deeper bond, as good meals and laughter and a cozy leather banquette shared with beautiful souls will so often do. I adore each and every one of those women in ways that I can only truly express to them. They know, I hope, that I am forever grateful for their friendship and love and eternal kindness.
Wonderful women and dear friends, this naked vegan girl will gladly join you at any steak house any where when ever you ask me to do so. Just ask.
