Cyrus

April 9, 2008

Dinner was awesome.

We had a three course meal, with wine, but first started with champagne to go with the canapés. The ‘free’ canapés were served on a three tiered platter and you start with the bottom tier. Each tier is supposed to hit different taste buds. The first tier had a shrimp thing and a black olive tapenade bite. The second tier had a banana blossom thing and the top tier had a spoon with one bite of Campari gel stuff with orange tang. Each bite had an interesting complexity that changed as you ate it. For instance, the banana blossom didn’t taste like banana until after you swallowed it and waited for a little bit.

Then there was a ‘free’ Amuse Bouche (a little frozen treat to cleanse the pallet).

They brought out bread with two butters - a salted cow's butter from France, and an unsalted local goat butter - and two salts (red Hawaiian, and flaked sea salt). I'm not a big fan of goat anything, but this butter was pretty nice.

My starter was a Thai marinated lobster with avocado, mango, and hearts of palm, served with a Kermit Schmidt dry Riesling. It was tasty, but honestly the lobster was a little chewy.

There was another 'free' plate: a little 1" piece of seared tuna on top of a little (1t.) stack of maybe alfalfa sprouts and chive sprigs and chive flowers, and next to it was a dollop of sweet potato puree and in the center of that was finely chopped ginger and maybe daikon. This made up my favorite two bites the whole evening. Just a party for the taste buds.

Then I had the roulade of lamb with farro and rapini, and blood orange sauce - oh, my! - with a 1990 syrah. Probably the best lamb I've ever had.

There was a 'free' Cyrus fizz - mojito flavored - probably a two ounce thing with no alcohol - to cleanse the pallet.

Dessert was (of course) chocolate, served with a mas ameil (aged red wine –not quite a port). Dessert: a Butterfinger (peanutbutter/chocolate bar thing), a chocolate almond croquette (light and fluffy on a lemon sabayon), and then a chocolate malt ice cream (frozen chocolate ice cream and ice topped with fine layer of chocolate, topped with a strip of 'honeycomb' candy).

A free ‘mignardises’ – basically a candy treat – followed and I had a chocolate meltaway and a vanilla caramel. At the end they presented us each with a printed menu of what we had ordered, and a brownie in a beautiful little gold trimmed box. The brownie is wrapped in cellophane and has a sticker on it that says “Tomorrow”.

Very classy!

Okay, for two the three course meal, with wine pairings, came to $240 - the gift certificate covered it. The champagne was separate, then tip. Oh, well. Life is short.