Salutations, my succulent sentients:
Omakase. The newest way to spend money on food. but what a glorious way I took my husband for dinner at an Omakase restaurant near home for his birthday on Friday
Picture a subtly hidden entrance on a street you walk nearly every day. A entry way with gracious staff to take your coats and greet you by name, usher you to the inner sanctum. Sleek lines. Steel. Exotic wood. Tiny plates, elaborate nesting bowls, hot scented towels. A long smooth counter with 16 stools on one side and two expert chefs and a prep chef on the other the chefs are armed with short swords and cutting fish. Your evening begins.
(Here’s one of fifteen or so courses of individual bits of elaborate Japanese morsels served over two hours. I forgot to take photos of most of it. Was too busy enjoying myself.)
Wouldn’t it be amazing if you ate every single meal like omakase? No wolfing. No eating on the run or at your computer or by while watching bloody battles scenes in the newest blockbuster hit (truly: how can we eat while watching self-surgery or some of these even more wetly biological moments in videos?)
Imagine instead: You are sitting down with your family to a regular dinner and the cook (a kid? his dad? Whoever.) cuts a tiny bite of meatloaf, adds a scoop of mashed potatoes, arranges it on a fork and places it with great care on a tiny ceramic plate—then passes the bite to the first diner. “This is meatloaf made with 80% lean chuck from a large farm in the midwest, and factory-processed pork from a different large farm in the midwest, refrigerated for two weeks in a truck followed by a local supermarket, deep frozen for a week in our refrigerator, then thawed over several hours, blended with market-fresh Spanish onion, years-aged Worcestershire Sauce and reconstituted pulverized packet gravy…..accompanied by starchy potatoes from Idaho smashed together with butter and some slightly edgy sour cream….”
We would all be very thin, and possibly much more informed about what we eat.
Speaking of bizarre consequences — this stack of ten ones was given in change…they are so fresh that the serial numbers are sequential! How weird is that?
WRITING NEWS:
Am happy with the final cover for A FLASH OF DARKNESS and doing other marketing-related work this week - not the least is: I have a pub date! April 15, 2023! Mark your calendars!
Don’t forget to pick up a copy of the Best of After Dinner Conversation anthology to read “The Heaven- The Earth” it is a wonderful appetizer for the sorts of stories you will find in my collection. It is available now through this link!
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Random Final Thought
(Speaking of tiny portions of a good thing)
Here’s a lovely bit of new public art in Battery Park City.
A tiny morsel of perfection
love that reflection on the building - and your reflections -
Currently recovering from visualizing “wetly biological moments”