Not too Shabby for a Mom of 3 month old Twins, eh?

Last night we enjoyed our last sit down dinner at Charlie Trotter’s. The restaurant is closing after 25 years of spectacular service.

The menu is prefix. You do have two choices, vegetarian or not. I checked out both menus carefully. I was curious to see just how exciting he could make veggies. But after comparing the two, my new vegetarian tendencies flew out the window. Definitely meat. And the wine tasting menu to go with it please! For once Adam and I ordered exactly the same thing. I guess if there is only two choices, the chance of that happening are a lot better.

One of the greatest things about the menu was that, even though there were eight course, three of them were dessert. Now that’s my kind of menu!

Marinated Hamachi with Green Tomato Juice, Kalamata Olives & Avocado Sorbet

Every single dish was exquisite. Perfectly cooked and presented. And each time it was such a delight for an ex-wine industry worker like myself to taste something new and see how it interacted with the food. It reminded me of the good old days in Hong Kong. I won’t bore you with the entire menu, though I did shamelessly ask for a copy of it to bring home. Let’s just say the dishes were so tasty that, after the lamb I got Adam to agree he would let me cook lamb at home. Eight years I’ve lived with this man and couldn’t get him to commit to that! I didn’t have as much luck with the duck, even though Adam and I both truly enjoyed that as well.

Afterwards Charlie’s mother took us on a tour of the kitchen and wine cellar. I was particularly interesting in the cellar. Ex-wine girl, remember? There were two meticulously chilled and labelled wine rooms, separate rooms for the different temperatures needed for white and red. Charlie’s Mom showed us Charlie’s metal wrapped around a Jeroboam, from the marathon he ran in France for his

Triple Criollo Riviera Cake with Lemon Balm Puree & Strawberry-Tonka Bean Sorbet paired with a Late Harvest Zinfandel

40th birthday. She also pointed out the case of Champagne that Charlie brought from a 1907 shipwreck. It was perfectly stored at the bottom of the sea for 60 years. When they got it, they opened one up and found it was in excellent condition. You could even see how they used to wax the bottles back then, almost like candle drippings mushed together.

The dinner reservation was the first seating, at 6pm. The best part of such an early dinner is we were done by 9:30! After dinner we strolled home and debated going for just one more drink. In the end we decided to just head home, we already had such a nice time, wouldn’t it be amazing to end the evening with a reasonable bedtime as well? Yes, it would. Unfortunately all four kids woke us up all night. Sam woke every two hours. At one point I was nursing Aaron standing up over Sam’s crib while holding a pacifier in Sam’s mouth. Not an easy feat. Oh, and Jack threw up all over our bed, the floor and the bathroom. Night time has been unbelievably bad the past three nights here, but I don’t want to desecrate a blog about my paradisal dinner with it, so I’ll save it for another time.