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‘Date Night’ Kicks Off

Hey, everybody. Sorry that this is all there is tonight. Soon, though, there’ll be more for you, right here in this very space.

You see, tonight was the inaugural ‘date night’ extravaganza for the wife and I — we’ve found recently that our busy schedules generally leave us pooped and unmotivated, so we’ve vowed to spend a night on the town each month, wining and dining like regular folk do.

(Technically, we started our little game on Valentine’s Day, but since that was ‘Valentine’s Day’, and not ‘Date Night’, I’m not counting it. Besides, we didn’t come up with the idea until we were already at dinner that night. Clearly, it can’t be part of the series.)

Anyway, we just returned from the restaurant, and there’s much to share. Just — you know, not right now. But tune in tomorrow, and I’ll edit this post to include my thoughts on our restaurants forks and knives, what the waiter told the folks next to us about the chowder, and much, much more. Plus, I’ll come up with the usual drivel for tomorrow, as well. In the meantime, this is all you get, I’m afraid. Just think of it as an appetizer, with the main course to follow in the morning. Bon appetit!

Okay, I’m back.

(See, this blog thing is like a time machine, if you read it after the fact. For me, twelve hours have just passed. But for you — if you’re reading this on Sunday or later — it’s just been a few seconds. Ooooooooh. Blog magic!)

All right, enough nonsense. Let’s talk turkey here. Or, more accurately, let’s talk tenderloin. Beef tenderloin, at that. And roast chicken. And tasty red wine. And napkins, and silverware, and complimentary bread, and… look, let’s just do this thing, all right?

So, last night the missus and I tried out a tasty little morsel called Evoo. Now, I was really excited when we made the reservation — how exotic! How daring!

Then, of course, I realized that the name of the place wasn’t ‘Ewok’; it was ‘Evoo’, which really isn’t very much like ‘Ewok’ at all, really. I was rather looking forward to ordering up a plateful of the furry little bastards, too. They taste a lot like chicken, you know. Little hairy, big-eared chickens. Like I imagine Danny DeVito would be, only less ‘gamey’.

Anyway, despite that disappointment, we kept our reservation and decided to give Evoo a try. For those of you — like me — wondering whether the place was named by a drooling drunkard or a pig Latin fanatic, you can keep those ideas tucked safely in your pants. It’s not like that. ‘Evoo’ is just an acronym for ‘extra virgin olive oil’. And any restaurant that has the word ‘virgin’ in the name, or even the initial standing for ‘virgin’, is okay in my Zagat book.

Our dinner at Evoo was good — tasty wine, tasty apps, and entrees that were… how should I put it? Tasty. Yeah, that’ll do. This isn’t a frigging review site; I’m not getting out the thesaurus for this crap. But I will say this about the place — they know how to make a fashionless yutz like me feel comfortable.

You see, Evoo is one of those restaurants that’s right on the cusp of being upscale and pretentious, but doesn’t quite go all the way. The waiters looked neat and sharp, but a few of them wore jeans with their button-downs. The patrons, too, were attired in a range of ensembles, from folks like me in jeans and rugbies to posh uppity types in suits and ties. And there were just enough people in each camp to make everyone feel at home. Nice.

But the real way to tell that this was an establishment trying to include all of God’s creatures with passable table manners and a valid credit card was the silverware. First off, it was wasn’t plastic, which is a very classy touch. The metal cutlery tends to dissuade the riff-raff.

(Hey, I’m riff-raff, but I’m not that kind of riff-raff. I at least know which end of the spoon to use. Never mind that I just learned a couple of years ago, after what my wife terms the ‘Tomato Bisque Incident’. All that matters is that I know now, right?)

In any case, the real genius behind the silverware at Evoo is this — it’s a fancy enough place to warrant two forks and two knives in each place setting, but it’s mercifully friendly enough to make each pair identical. And for uncouth heathens like me, that’s absolutely key. I can feel like I’m at the ‘big boy table’, with all that silverware in front of me, yet I don’t have the paralyzing anxiety of whether to use the big knife or the little one to butter my bread, or the three-pronged or the four-pronged fork to scratch my back between courses.

(Hey, I said I was a heathen. What the hell do you want from me?)

Suffice to day that I was very impressed with Evoo‘s approach to the restaurant arts. The only faux pas that I witnessed was also the most entertaining thing that happened while we were there. Here’s how it went down:

When we were seated, our waitress told us that they had run out of one of the specials, a fish chowder of some kind or other. Personally, I prefer my fish unliquefied, so I wasn’t terribly heartbroken. That’s just me. But as we were wrapping up, the folks at the table next to us were just sitting down and settling in. Their waiter passed out their menus and mentioned that they might be out of the chowder.

(Apparently, he wasn’t as ‘in the loop’ as our server; they’d been out of the stuff for an hour or more, and he was just getting word? Pfftt. Amateur.)

So, he went back to the kitchen to check, since the girl at the table sounded interested in a bowl of chowder, were one available for slurping. Alas, the waiter came back and gave them the bad news, but he didn’t quite know when to shut up. The exchange went something like this:

Waiter: Yeah, I’m sorry. I just checked, and we are out of the chowder. Sorry about that.

Girl at Table: Aw, that’s too bad.

Waiter: Yeah — it was made with some really good salmon; it had a coconut milk base, with really subtle spices and chives. Really creamy.

Girl at Table: Well, darn. It does sound good.

Waiter: Yeah, it was. It sure was.

Guy at Table: Okay, then. No chowder. Got it. I think I’ll start with the merlot.

Girl at Table: Yes, me, too.

Waiter: All right, then. Two merlots. Boy, it sure is too bad we ran out of chowder. It really was very good chowder.

Finally, the waiter moved on, which was probably in his best interests. I’m pretty sure that if he’d said the word ‘chowder’ one more time, the guy at the table would have hopped up and given him a corkscrew noogie. And that’s not ‘corkscrew’ as in the shape, that’s ‘corkscrew’ as in the little doohickey used to open wine bottles. There’s a very good chance he’d have lost an eye, or worse.

Anyway, I don’t know what the hell the guy was thinking. If you’re out of something, don’t go on about it over and over, right? If it’s not available, then shut up about it, and move on to something else. It’s pretty simple, really. I mean, you don’t see me sitting here writing about stuff I wish I had, but don’t, like… I don’t know — boobs, for instance.

Oh. Right. Okay, bad example. And anyway, I’m not a waiter, offering to pass out boobs to other people, then discovering I’m fresh out, and waxing poetic about how fantastic boobs would be right about now. No. I just skip right to the ‘wax poetic’ part, only usually without much of the ‘poetic’ bit.

(The wax, now, that’s another story. Nothing but goodness can come out of the intersection of boobs and waxing. I think that’s patently obvious.)

Okay, as usual, I’ve devolved from a real, honest topic into a bunch of babble about breasticles. Ah, well — what’re you gonna do? I can’t help it if I’ve got boobies on the brain. Hey, it was date night. *Rrrraawwwwrrr*!