The gf and I ate well above our means tonight at a wonderful Peruvian/fusion restaurant on Valencia. It's been around for a number of years now, but neither of us had managed to get there until tonight. Excellent food, they got there, but spendy. We started with a salad of mixed greens and shaved fennel (we're all about the fresh fennel of late) tossed with oranges and a citrus mustard vinaigrette which Astrid called "subtle" and I thought rather "bold." Along with the salad, we ate a ceviche of raw halibut, large prawns, calamari, octopus, and mussels dressed with lime juice and fresh salsa and served with haricot beans, roasted corn, and and a yam paté. For the main event, we shared a generous (read: hella big) pan roasted pork chop with cabbage and bacon hash and mushroom ragú (uh, YUM!) and a tuna tartare, spiced with toasted sesame oil and other Asian flavors. The tartare was served with crisp wonton tips. The fusion of Asian and Latin styles was a bit weird to take in at first, but the tartare really worked. I would tweak the pork chop dish just a wee bit if I were head chef for a day: it was just ever so slightly overcooked, and the mushroom ragú was a touch too salty, even for me, a gal with a high tolerance for the sodium chloride.
The wine list at Limón is fantastic, organized by "red" and "white," but also broken down into accessible categories like "floral spicy" and "dry crisp." Astrid enjoyed a Sanoma Cutrer chardonnay from the Russian River, and I had a lovely Spanish sauvignon blanc, the name of which I've long forgotten (if I ever even knew the name--Astrid did the ordering for us this evening). When the entrées arrived, Astrid switched to a zinfandel, but I stuck with the one glass.
Yes, we got dessert, too, god help us. It was a fucking ridiculously rich--but somehow also airy--flourless chocolate cake, piping hot, with a dark chocolate sauce, fresh figs, and a scoop of arroz con leche ice cream. Holy crap!
Price tag $150.00 w/ tip
Health index: pretty abysmal
Satisfaction: through the roof
After dinner, Astrid really wanted to go dancing. She had the bug, 'cause she'd done Argentine tango this afternoon with Nan. We were both too tired to mission out in the cold evening to find a venue for after dinner dancing, so we biked home and rumba'd* in the living room for a spell.
'Twas quite a magical evening.
*"Verbification" of the word "rumba" brought to you by my nephew, Joey, an aficionado of the liberal evolution of the English language.
1 comment:
I am a fellow fan of the liberal evolution of the English language (and please, it's not like we are all going to go around saying "brid" for "bird" just because that's the way it was once upon a time, are we?). But I had never thought that the verbification of dances was anything radical (or even liberal) before. Don't we say "let's waltz" and doesn't it take two "to tango"? Oddly, a look at m-w.com does show that while "waltz" and "tango" have well-established uses as intransitive verbs, "rumba" does not. Well, it's high time so thank you and thank your nephew.
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