a new blog?
no, i did not fall off the face of the earth. just very busy with holidays and such. actually, that’s a lie. i was slightly busy with holiday stuff, and mostly just lazy.
everyone’s entitled to be a bit lazy now and then, right? i had the week between christmas and new year’s as vacation from work, so i made it a real vacation and didn’t do anything except what i really wanted to do.
and i didn’t want to blog. so there. but now i do.
kirk and i had a marvelous time, though. we went to reading to visit the in-laws, where we had two very nice meals at the inn at moselem springs, one a dinner on christmas eve and the second a sunday brunch on the day after christmas.
i do want to give them a small hint, though.
at dinner, or indeed at anytime, proper wine service does not consist of opening the bottle in the kitchen, stuffing the cork back in halfway, bringing it out and leaving it on the table in this condition along with 4 glasses, and then leaving yourself. you read that right. the wine was opened in the kitchen and not tableside. the wine was not poured into a glass at the table for someone to taste. did i end up drinking ripple or mad dog 20/20 or thunderbird poured into a nice bottle and half-recorked in the kitchen? i doubt it, but i’ll never know for sure.
now i am not a snob about these things, but there is a practical side to tableside wine service. and that is, that you are reasonably sure of getting what you paid for. maybe they don’t sell much wine in that restaurant. maybe the very young and obviously inexperienced waiter didn’t know how to open a bottle of wine. who knows. in the end, we were with the in-laws so we didn’t say anything, and it was i guess more amusing in an unexpectedly shocking way than anything. but the food made up for it. i got a gargantuan slab of perfectly medium rare prime rib and voluminous fixins for, oh i don’t know, $3.49 or something close. and the sunday brunch was nice as well. i had a plate of breakfast, and followed it up with a plate of lunch, studiously avoiding anything fish. i’ve read my kitchen confidential.
haven’t you? in case you haven’t, never get anything with fish at a brunch, because it’s the last of the fish they bought on thursday for the weekend, which means it’s at least four days not fresh and probably more. plus it’s cooked probably not very well by whoever they can talk into working on sunday morning, who i assure you is not the head chef who cooked on saturday night a few hours previous.
but, other than the fish at brunch which i cannot vouch for, and the wine which i really can’t vouch for either, it was a really great restaurant that i’d recommend if you are in the area, which, given that there are very few options anyway within a probably twenty-mile radius other than fast foods, means that you’d probably be eating here anyway if you were in the area since there’s nowhere else to go. but it’s worth a drive as well, say, a half-hour drive.
and the prices are good, which usually translates to “i’m always shocked anytime i eat in a restaurant outside of manhattan and the bill for the whole table of four is less than my meal alone in manhattan usually is,” but in this case translates to “the prices were much higher than everything else in the area, but it’s still cheaper than what you’d pay in manhattan.”
i think i’m losing perspective. big time.
and, by the way, the review is spurious, not the restaurant.
no. really.