Soba noodles, at Restaurant Nippon.
Monkfish and calamari, at Aquavit.
Smoked trout, at Gramercy Tavern.
Huevos rancheros, at Norma's.
If a writer is a person who hates to write, is a blogger a person who hates to dash off unpolished, but timely posts? I’ve been awful about keeping this blog up to date, especially considering the fabulous dining (and other) adventures experienced in the last few months. Here in the early days of the new year, hindsight (and increasingly faulty memory) allow some details to fall away and provide crystalline vignettes of others: A fall visit to Blackberry Farm, with its new restaurant and dining room; a delicious chicken, lentil and sweet potato soup for our Sunday supper club, with a chocolate-and-vanilla buttercream with crushed candy cane birthday cake dessert; another great dinner at our favorite Knoxville-area restaurant, the Foothills Milling Co., in Maryville, and above all, incredible NYC meals, including a crab-and-coconut milk soup in the dining room of the Modern, at the Museum of Modern Art, overlooking the sculpture garden; a transcendant meal of Scandanavian delights at Aquavit, in a teak-appointed dining room that was as spare and clean as a sauna; fantastic people watching at Le Grenouille (full-length minks, expensive hair); “21” (old-school NYC families gathered around the bar fireplace); Ruby Foo’s (the Times Square parade of humanity just outside our window); Norma’s (the in-crowd digging in to hearty pancake-and-egg breakfasts at Le Parker Meridian). We also stumbled into a wonderfully old-fashioned family-run Japanese restaurant, Restaurant Nippon, which serves barley and other produce from its Canadian farm. We were thoroughly thrilled, delighted and exhausted — so much so that I can barely remember anything except a fantastic smoked trout at a late-night Gramercy Tavern dinner. Other great memories have nothing to do with food — the massive crowds, the store windows, the tree at Rockefeller Center, and laughing our heads off from the third row at Pee-Wee Herman’s Broadway show. Fortunately, we missed the blizzard that wreaked travel havoc for so many; still, that trip and the Christmas travels since then took so much out of us we’re still not up to speed — and we’re getting ready for our annual group trek to Asheville. So stay tuned for further reports!