Eating Out

72,000 Grains Of Rice

The “Gang of Six” meet tonight at Miyabi Japanese restaurant in Augusta for dinner. We had a 5:30 reservation and it is a good thing, as Donna and I arrived first, a couple minutes after five, and there was already a wait for walk-ins of 45 minutes.

Every one is seated at tables of 8, so we six are joined by a woman and her 5-year old son. They sat on the same end of the table as Donna and I and the little boy was very well behaved. Turns out they have eaten here before and it his favorite restaurant, even more so than McDonalds. He even ate with chop sticks (although they did have training wheels.)

If you have eaten at one of these places, you know the drill, a chef comes out and cooks in front of you. There are slashing knives and flipping spatulas. There is copious amounts of food cooked in a lot of butter and soy sauce. He sautees up some vegetables and then brings out this giant bowl of white rice and inverts it on the grill. It is the size of a basketball, I bet there are 72,000 grains of rice there. After it is separated into 8 parts, each serving is 3 x 6 x 2″ thick. Finally the meat is cooked and added to your plate, the pile of food in front of you is now enough to feed a small African nation. All 3 couples left with enough stuff in a to go box for lunch for two for another day.

For dessert we had homemade raspberry yogurt at one couple’s home and discussed everything from Presidential campaigns to Japanese after market parts for Miatas to whether Gene Simmons either aced the previous evening’s Celebrity Apprentice challenge or maybe marked himself for firing next week.

On the way back to Aiken the Emperor clicked over the 72,000 mile mark.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 1o

Lost on Altair IV

Forbidden PlanetI’ve weeded out one post per month for inclusion in my Best of 2007 page. Pickings were slim. Pretty much the whole year was full of eating out meal recaps and Post Office Safaris travelogues. Not my best work.

I’m surprised you are still out there reading, that is if you *are* still out there.

So tomorrow, or the next day, when the link shows up on the sidebar for Best of 2007 don’t click on it, click on the one from, say, 2003, it’ll be better. Then again if you are the kind of person who slows down to rubberneck at accident scenes, read away.

I can’t promise that next year will be any better, it could get worse. I guess we’ll just have wait and see.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 505

You Would Think I Would Learn

There is a new Italian restaurant in town that took over the spot where a Chinese place was for the longest time. In between these two it was a Thai place, but for less than a year. The nice thing about this location is it is in a shopping center that is walkable for us, a little less than a mile away from home.

Now that they have been open for a little over a month and the crowds have died down, we went there for dinner tonight. We didn’t walk, but maybe next time. And the next time will be at least another month or more away though, because they still haven’t worked out all the kinks.

The hostess offered us a table, but there were several empty booths and we requested one. This stopped her in her tracks. I’m sure she was trying to steer us towards the tables to be fair about wait staff distribution, but she was literally paralyzed, couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. A waiter was there and whispered something to her and then seated us at one of the booths. After not too long our waiter arrived and took our drink order, two waters. As we usually do, we didn’t let him get away, and gave him our dinner order right then as well. Two small garden salads and a 14″ supreme pizza. He seemed in a rush. After he left us he took a pizza order from the table behind us and then there was a big gap. No waters. The guy who seated us noticed and asked if we had ordered drinks and we replied positively, he rushed off too. About a minute later our waiter arrived with the glasses of water and remarked about the sloooow ice machine.

I counted 6 waiters or waitresses and about 35 diners, not too bad a ratio, but all of the wait staff seemed to be in a big hurry when they moved and it still seemed that not a lot was getting done fast. Our salads arrived and they were the right size for a small and had a nice mixture of different lettuces and vegetables. Then there was a long wait for the pie. A few couples that came in after us and ordered spaghetti or ravioli or whatever got served well before us. Across the restaurant a pizza was served to a table, but a short time later was returned to the kitchen. From where we were, we couldn’t hear what the issue was, but the one person of the group who got a meal was served and the rest of his party had to settle for watching him eat.

More waiting. Dinners came out of the kitchen frequently, but no pizzas. Finally, because Donna could see the kitchen exit, she said here comes one. Maybe it is ours. Nope, it stops at the table behind us. Our orders went in at the same time, so it will be a non-issue as long as our pizza is not too far behind. The guy behind us says, this isn’t the pizza I ordered, so the waiter returns to the kitchen with it. Donna goes over to him and asks what the problem was. He replies, “It looked delicious, but there was too much stuff on it.” She tells him, “It was probably ours as we ordered a Supreme.”

Sure enough, the waiter returns within moments and brings us our pizza. Worth the wait. There is heaping helpings of mozzarella cheese, pepperoni, ham, sausage, onions, bell peppers, olives and mushrooms on a crisp not too thin crust. The only thing lacking was it needed a little bit more sauce.

Good salad, good pie, less than a mile away, if they get their service smoothed out, Ferrando’s may have met his match.

In spite of a brief detour back into the kitchen, the pizza was served piping hot. So hot that I burned the top of my mouth in a couple places on the first few bites. After all the years of eating pizza, I still manage to burn the top of my mouth on melted mozzarella or boiling sauce 80% of the time. You would think I would learn.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 487

Gafinkleforp

Mystery FieldIt took a while this morning, but we finally got off our duffs and made it into Hitchcock Woods around 9:30. For grins we headed all the way over to an entrance on the other side from where we usually enter, so we could walk on some different trails. One new place we passed by was called Mystery Field and there were two mysteries about it that we could see, 1) it really wasn’t a field, but more of an area covered in youngish pine trees and 2) a lot of the trees were painted with blue markings.

We stayed at our company shindig long enough to eat and the door prize drawings before sneaking out the back door. We both “won” prizes, Donna got to take home one of the two large flower arrangements and I was selected to take home one of the small table flower arrangements. Not only did we really not want the big flowers, we weren’t sure they would fit in the Miata, so we gave them away to someone who was sitting at our table.

Stopped on the way home to buy gas. There was a white Miata in the adjacent lot of a restaurant, so while the tank was filling I walked over and put an MMC calling card under their windshield wiper. After filling up we went into Krogers to do our weekly shopping. Pushing the cart out the door I paused as the woman of the couple in front of us snagged some home buyers or apartment guides out of the rack. The couple who grabbed the brochures were in front of us along with two other women shoppers heading towards our section of the parking lot. There was a white Miata parked out there near us and I speculated as to if it was the same one. We both wondered which of the pairs would get in the Miata. The male/female couple made a beeline for the Miata and Donna said to me quietly, “Don’t go say hi, I don’t want to spend 20 minutes in the parking lot chatting.” We were loading the bags in our trunk and as the woman got in the white Miata she noticed us and waved. I noticed the same 1/4 raised stuck power antenna as the one from the restaurant parking lot. I wonder if they thought the card and then seeing us was a coincidence?

Tonight’s title is a word I made up. It returned zero hits on Google. How long will it take for this post to show up in a search engine? How long before someone besides myself searches for the “word” gafinkleforp?

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 471

Wine & Dine Subset

A Miata Darkly IIOnly a real die-hard Miata nut would have recognized the car in last night’s picture as a Miata. And only the Uber Miata Geek subset of that group would have been able to tell you that the car could only be either a 2004 or 2005 because of the speakers built into the windblocker behind the seats.

Ah, Friday night. Donna and I drove to Augusta right after work to meet with MMC‘s Fine Dining Subset for a nice evening out. This month’s pick was Calvert’s. All three of the couples like to eat diner early so we took advantage of Calvert’s Sunset Special which includes salad, entree and desert for $28.95 a couple. Donna had a seafood crepe; shrimp, scallops and crab meat served in a light French crepe and covered with a lobster champagne sauce and I opted for the pecan-encrusted pork.

Tomorrow will be a hike in the woods in the morning and the ASCO Management Club’s annual Christmas meeting in the evening. The Management Club is a subset of the company’s employees that consist of the salaried folks and we get together four times a year for a buffet dinner at a local country club or restaurant and sometimes there is a speaker. The year end one is different in that spouses (or a guest) are allowed to attend and instead of a speaker there is music and dancing. The HR department waited too long to book a place, so instead of the usual middle of December date we are having it in early November. To make up for it we are going to have our office Thanksgiving dinner at work the second week of December.

Sunday is possibly a quick drive northwest to get the Post Offices in Clifton and White Stone, they are the last ones in the Spartanburg subset.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 471

General Elliott Inn

Haven’t talked much about eating out since I stopped keeping track of expenses. And I might not have said anything about tonight either because we didn’t pay. A coworker, who took me out to eat when I first got hired at ASCO, after 18 years, got around to doing it again tonight. He and his wife took Donna and I out to eat at a local B & B that serves dinner only on Friday and Saturday evenings.

When Eddie and his wife Lee moved out of town twenty years ago the 16 acres they bought was way out in the sticks. As Aiken has grown there has been a little bit of developing out that way, but not too much. Within the last five years though, out northeast of town has become a haven for polo players with large chunks of property being broken up into slightly smaller sections for polo farms. With it has come some money and road improvements, why even, Lee and Eddie no longer live on a dirt road.

A few years ago a couple bought a big house across from a polo club and opened a Bed & Breakfast. That B & B is just a stones throw from where Lee and Eddie live, so consequentially they have befriended the Innkeepers and with that have found a place to eat their Friday evening’s dinners, the General Elliott Inn.

I can see why they like to eat here every Friday night. The food was excellent, plentiful and rich, but for that very reason I know Donna and I couldn’t eat there every week. Once every couple months is about our tolerance level for that sort of decadence.

Thanks Eddie. I’ll be looking forward to 2025.

Started up, went down, back up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 424

Call Me Ungrateful

I sold the Camcorder to a co-worker.

Finished my 11th Spenser book and didn’t find anything resembling a Crime Buster Rule.

The cut on my arm doesn’t look nearly as bad as I thought.

Added another old chestnut to the Joke Page.

Got 30 seconds of very loud belt squeal backing out of the garage this morning (and the A/C wasn’t even on.)

I have finished burning all the commercial CDs of my collection (probably have 30 homemade mix discs yet to do.)

I should be writing up the MMC Meeting Minutes, but instead I’m writing this trumpery.

Due to popular demand I will no longer be keeping track of our meals out. If we interpolate, the totals for 2008 would be $2898.07 spent on 170 meals eaten out of 1095 possible.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 321