dollarshort (retired)

Tempura Dinner

It's great to see Furukawa-san, the CEO of Nifty using their newly launched (it launched on December 2) Cocolog service powered by TypePad to keep his own weblog - it's a testament to his belief in weblogs and TypePad and should be an inspiration for large companies who get involved in the weblogging space.

It was especially great to see this post appear on his own weblog yesterday because it reminded me that I wanted to write about the tempura dinner that we experienced while in Tokyo.

Imagine a two hour tempura meal that doesn't weigh you down or make you cringe at the sight of battered anything. The restaurant, which will remain nameless since I never caught it, was the polar opposite of probably most every place I have ever eaten tempura in the United States. The batter was light, the oil was fresh, the selection varied from fish spine tempura (like a potato chip) to the freshest shrimp ever. I'm no Jeffrey Steingarten so I fear that my review of the evening doesn't illustrate what a fine meal we had.

Oh, and it was the first time that I ever had warm sake; I must say it was certainly a eye-opening experience. Regardless, it was a dinner I will not soon forget.

Below are a couple pictures from the night.

Dinner at Tabla

As I mentioned in this post about our trip to New York, we had a great dinner at Tabla, an Indian fusion restaurant recommended to us by Alaina. Tabla has a more casual counterpart, Bread Bar at Tabla, on the first level of the restaurant.

The dinner was expensive -- the most we've ever spent for one meal. We justified it because it was our birthday celebratory meal and because we were in New York. Let me just say that nothing makes one feel more like a pampered, over-privileged member of society than spending a good chunk of a rent payment on one dinner. Despite my initial urgings not to splurge, the seven various wine offerings helped me stomach the cost. Unfortunately, this same wine caused me to call most of my family members to let them know how much I loved them. To which my mother responded: "Oh, you're a happy drunk!"

About the dinner: It was our first experience with a Chef's tasting menu so the idea that each course was to be a surprise was quite exciting. As we received the cutlery and wine for the next course, we tried to guess what we were about to receive. Since I had asked our waiter for no "rabbit, duck, veal or lamb" (cute animals, basically), we were treated to a host of fish dishes. My favorite courses from the tasting menu were the Rice Flaked black sea bass, Seared Australian King Prawn and scallop and Rhubarb sorbet with Gewurztraminer soup.

For those interested in the Chef's Market Menu that was prepared for us, I've posted it below.

Rewards

I'm terrible at estimating how long it will take to finish a task. So, yesterday, when we were putting the finishing touches on this version of the beta, I told Ben that I was going to reward myself with a donut when we released. He asked when I thought we'd be finished and I said "2:00 pm." In actuality, that was about 20 hours off.

So we've started a new beta and I'm ready for my donut.

It's not just any donut, though. It's this one.

You're probably thinking that this is a pretty sad reward for such a large task. We just have different priorities.