In Las Vegas recently, we opted out of a tasting menu at a casino restaurant so utterly handsome it must be where angels go if they are very, very good or where wealthy “uncles” of an age take their “nieces,” if the girls are very, very bad.
We got no further than peeking in the door to this spectacular dining room so I cannot review the evening’s blue-plate special—a 15-course sampler of treats that I mostly didn’t recognize and couldn’t pronounce, paired with wines beyond my station in life. The tab was $350 plus tip.
I wouldn’t have gone for the tasting menu—even on a Japanese-style expense account—because three of the 15 sampler descriptions included the words foi gras and pate. Like beets, liver of any pedigree shall never pass my lips. As for the wines, I find it hard to swallow prices by-the-glass that that are higher than I care to spend per bottle.
This brings me to a real bargain—a Washington State chardonnay, Chateau Ste Michelle. It’s bottled at Woodinville, Wa., and the label says it contains “flavors of apple and citrus fruit with subtle oak notes,” thanks to “sur He” aging. I don’t know about “sur He” aging, but this chardonnay was “sur tasty” that I could have avoided a lot of table attentiveness to friends at dinner just by serving everyone a bottle and straw. The wine guys at Byerly’s in St. Louis Park came up with this gem for just under $11 a bottle. Ms. Chairman, you could use this modestly priced vintage to educate your soccer chums away from red and white Ripple, even though those vintages are lightly carbonated (I’ve been told).
Stop me if you've already heard this...
Mother Superior calls all the nuns together and says to them: "I must tell you all something. We have a case of gonorrhea in the convent."
"Thank God," says an elderly nun at the back of the room, "I'm so tired of Chardonnay."
Posted by: Joatmoaf at March 25, 2006 12:46 AM