08. 14. DINNER

sauteed mussels

This was the actual birthday dinner I had with the family. Thursday evening was a solo recital for the recorder, courtesy of a son of a friend of my mother’s (I prefer longer longwinded interpersonal descriptions) — wait, let me rephrase that. Courtesy of the elder of two sons of a friend of my mother’s who also has her office next to my mother’s in the building in which the School of Nursing professors have their offices. Okay. I guess that’s passable. So I was to have made reservations for four at Mad for Garlic, near where the concert was being held, but I put it off until the day before (even now I don’t think it was an unreasonable thing to do) and all the reservation slots had filled up by the time I called (now that’s unreasonable). Fortunately when we got there at six, the time they advised, there were still seats and we made it in with no trouble. Mad for Garlic is stupidly overpriced and incredibly self-righteous, but that is fine with me because their menu is huge and their food is rather good. We started off with sauteed mussels because my mother, much like me, experiences tunnel vision whenever mussels are mentioned in her vicinity and she must have them no matter what. If she hadn’t, I would have insisted on it, besides. I want you to read this in James Franco’s voice: so good.

garlicholic rice

Man, that is a terrible picture. Excuse the blurry. The restaurant was super dark and the problem with digital cameras is that unless you have a vague idea of what you’re doing, the camera is going to give you a messy piece of crap. Then again before the more analog kind was back in vogue, we had the problem of never quite knowing if we were even managing to take the picture at all, so it’s a fair trade-off. Garlicholic rice is basically just fried rice with some garlic and other stuff thrown it, and James Franco repeats: so good. They obviously had to just to succeed, but they do this thing where you can eat all the garlic in their food, as much as you want, and still you won’t get that breathy aftertaste for hours afterwards. Wow! Magic! I swear I’m not a spokesperson, honest.

vongole mare pasta

Another of my faults: if you give me the choice and if it is possible, I will always go vongole. Even if the tomato-based sauces come topped with mountains of seafood or really good meat or — God help us — bacon, it is physically impossible for me to deny vongole spaghetti. This is kind of like how if you give me the reins, I will choose Japanese food for every single meal. The whole “we had Japanese for lunch so what should we have for dinner” nonsense does not compute. The two meals are independent of each other and both times, the superior choice is clear. Actually it might be a good thing that people don’t allow me to do this, because then I would suffer an existential breakdown from not being able to ever eat pickled crab. Huh.

grilled pizza

That it’s “grilled” says nothing about what’s actually on it, but it was in fact a big part of the reason why we chose it. It’s got mushroom and mozzarella cheese, and we would have gone for the rucola but that came with sweet potatoes and I am not the biggest fan of sweet potatoes on pizza. Later on my mother was lusting after the gorgonzola pizza that the couple at the table over were having, so if we can go before vacation’s over, we’ll be having that. The grilled pizza was pretty good too, but I think Bellamonte does it better, which doesn’t mean a whole lot because Bellamonte’s pizza isn’t world-class or anything. At least they all beat out Di Matteo, which, despite that, is still my favorite.

green tea ice cream

Dessert is rarely if ever my favorite part of the meal, and usually I’m not even particular about having it at all, but dear sweet Lord this has a good shot at overturning that altogether. This deserves three James Francos at once, count them, three: sooo gooooood. The flavor was stronger than is customary, which is a thousand times YES because Jesus God this was so rich and illegally creamy and it tasted more like green tea than diluted milk thank you thank you thank you Mad for Garlic. Fact: the picture kind of makes it look like the ice cream scoops and the tray are making the Joker face. This just renders everything that much better. HA HA HA

tiramisu cake

Isn’t this adorable? The picture is again suffering from a case of the blurs, but look at that little chocolate-powder garlic there, aw. The cake was also really good, I would have been satisfied with just a double serving of the green tea ice cream but even for someone not completely crazy about tiramisu (no, I do like it immensely, but I’ve noticed that fans of tiramisu get a little frightening when the culinary pushing comes to the shoving) it was excellent. Altogether excellent. And just today my brother’s birthday present for me arrived, which is a DVD that they’ve stopped making — honestly, the movie was released in 2005, why would you cease production like that? It’s pretty popular from what I gather — no, now I’m just lying, it’s not all that popular at all. It’s a cult hit, except here “cult” means “people who were teenage girls or close friends of teenage girls in 2005″. So he ordered it secondhand from a DVD rental store that was going out of business, and they shipped it in that rental-store plastic box that requires an authorized machine to get the disc out, oh laugh out loud. We pried it open and it is safe and sound in my hands. All miiiiiine. What are birthdays for, if not unreasonable demands? I have many others lined up for years to come.

08. 03. LUNCH

cream of corn soup

I have a few complaints to register. Never mind that registering complaints is what I’m mostly doing at all hours of the day, but this is really important. Kind of. Well, no less important than all my other complaints. Just listen. Except you’re not the people that should be listening — get me the owner of Paris Croissant, COEX branch. Whoever decided that it was okay to “upgrade” a perfectly decent restaurant into a disgustingly overpriced venue where nothing is cheaper than fifteen dollars — wait, no, this is wrong, that doesn’t make it sound expensive enough, but it totally is, and most things are in the twenty to thirty-dollar range anyway, but my point is, someone went ahead and made a restaurant less accessible to me without asking my permission first and this angers me. Also your cream of corn soup was only decent! It was okay, but I wouldn’t murder for it! So take that!

parpadelle with tomato sauce

Obviously, the fact that I’m not really crazy about cream of corn soup to begin with has no bearing, because it’s not like I dislike it, and if you’re going to up the price by that much, the least you can do is give me soup that makes me want to raze down the rest of the mall just so that you can set out a couple more tables. But I could have forgiven this, after all it’s unsightly to complain about the cost of food especially when there are more affordable restaurants at hand. But what I really can’t stand is that you took my favorite item off the menu, you idiots! Actually they probably overhauled the entire menu, but the only thing I can distinctly remember having here and nowhere else is this — this salad, with really thin slices of beef brisket and this great dressing that came in a loooong dish and I am tearing up even though I have totally talked about all this before. The force of my rage can only be aptly expressed through Internet acronyms: HDU, Paris Croissant. HDU. IDAWTC. GTFO STFD and DIAF >:O

margherita pizza

And if you are going to tell me THAT’S BASIL sprinkled on top of your pizza I WILL END YOU. Okay so the pizza was okay. I mean no, it wasn’t! It’s just regular cheese pizza with cherry tomatoes and basil lying pathetically over it! This is not a battlefield!! I mean, for cheese pizza it was pretty good though. And the Parpadelle was acceptable. I guess. BUT NO! YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE MY WRATH! That is if by wrath you mean me typing to myself on this remote little online corner while your restaurant flourishes under the patronage of first-date couples, an alarmingly large number of which seem to crowd COEX on weekends. I mean come on, people, there are better places to go hang out than at the mall. Leave the mall to the people without dates, and you families, you guys go to amusement parks or something, take the kids outside. Gosh. Some people.