Salad Is Slaughter

Last Thursday we attended the Great Chefs dinner at Manresa with Chef Josiah Citrin from Melisse in Santa Monica.  We had reservations for Picasso in Las Vegas on Monday and I didn’t know if we wanted to spend that much on dinner twice in one week.  We decided to go and we weren’t disappointed.

They were serving canapés for the first half hour or so.  We munched on them and drank some champagne while we waited for everyone to show up.  There were three canapés that we sampled:  a taro chip (kind of like a potato chip but better.  I remember eating them as part of other dishes at Manresa), an olive-based pastry, and a corn-based treat.  The corn item was the best.

After the canapés they served an amuse-bouche featuring a fried chickpea stick.  It was kind of like eating falafel but with a more interesting sauce.  There was something else with the chickpea, but I don’t remember what it was.

The first course was tomato soup, but not just any tomato soup.  They brought out a bowl and in the center was tomato sorbet and some diced vegetables.  Then they poured hot tomato soup around the sorbet.  Essentially you had an island of cold tomato surrounded by a sea of hot tomato.  It was fantastic.  The flavors were great and the hot and freezing items together in one bowl was great.

Next up was a scallop dish.  The scallops were cooked perfectly and the sauce was very good.  Unfortunately, I kept comparing this dish to the scallops I had at Picasso earlier in the week, and these weren’t quite as good.  If it had been a month or two since I had eaten this caliber of food, I would have said that these scallops were wonderful.  Note to self:  Don’t eat at five-star restaurants with world-class chefs more often than once per month.

Course number three was monkfish in saffron sauce and a baked clam.  The monkfish flavor was a little strong (some people really like that) but it was good.  The baked clam was great.  It had a pesto type crust that matched well with the clam.  I could eat a whole bowl of just those clams.

After the monkfish and clams, they served squab.  It was very good, and my second-favorite dish of the evening behind the tomato soup.  After the squab they served an apricot sorbet followed by a chocolate dessert.  Both were very good.

The only downside to the evening was that there was a 30-minute wait between each course.  Normally reservations are spread out over the evening so they can get a steady flow going in the kitchen.  On Thursday they were serving the entire restaurant at once so they had to complete on course before moving on to the next.

Manresa’s chef David Kinch stopped by several tables after the dinner was completed and talked to various patrons.  We talked with him for about 10 minutes or so.  We talked about his tasting menu – I like the fact that he doesn’t print a menu for it and it’s basically secret.  He told us that sometimes the tasting menu varies from table to table on the same night.  He also agrees with me that not getting the wine pairings with dinner is stupid.  See my rant at the end of for details. 

David Kinch will be going down to Santa Monica’s Melisse to do the same kind of guest chef dinner for Josiah Citrin.  It sounded like some of the guests were going to make a road trip down south to give it a try.  He also plans to bring in a chef from Vancouver in October for another Great Chefs dinner.  We may have to go back for that one.

This wasn’t the first time we’ve eaten dinner in the same room with millions of dollars worth of original art work. The first time was at Renoir in the Mirage hotel where we had dinner while looking at original Renoir paintings. This time we had dinner with $55,000,000 worth of original Picasso art.

We entered the restaurant and I gave my name to the maitre d’. She found our reservation, and then pulled out an index card. There were no more than six of those cards on her desk. We were taken to a table by the window overlooking the man-made lake sitting in front of the Bellagio hotel. From our table we could see the Eiffel tower and had front row seats for the Bellagio water show. We were wondering how we got the best seats in the house and decided that our names were on a list of people who had reservations during the Bellagio power outage and this was a make-up. We were pretty happy with it.

Picasso has two menu choices. There’s a five-course tasting menu where the first three courses are set, then you choose the main course and the dessert. There’s also a four-course menu that has several selections available for each course. Wine pairings are also available for each course. We went with the five-course tasting menu with the wine pairings.

Our first course was peekytoe crab salad with apple-champagne vinaigrette. This dish also had small pear-shaped tomatoes, both the yellow and the red varieties. The tomatoes were definitely vine-ripened and were far better than the flavorless tomatoes you get in the grocery store. The crab was very fresh and the apple-champagne dressing was wonderful.

Next up were roasted U-10 day boat scallops with potatoes mousseline and jus de veau. Potatoes mousseline and jus de veau is just a fancy way of saying “mashed potatoes and gravy” but those were the best mashed potatoes and gravy that I’ve ever had. The potatoes had to be 50 percent butter. The scallops were cooked perfectly and had a nice brown toasted surface while not overcooked in the middle. I’m always impressed when a top chef serves scallops because they are so difficult, and these were some of the best I’ve ever had.

Our third course was sautéed foie gras with dried organic sour cherries. Fresh cherries are in season and these were very good. The foie gras was a bit oily, that that’s to be expected. Chefs must like to use foie gras as a springboard for their sauces because I’ve never had the same thing twice.

For my main course I selected swordfish with saffron sauce, potatoes, and broccoli. It was very good. The fish was cooked perfectly and the sauce was a nice compliment. Janet had the aged lamb rôti with crust of truffles and au jus. I tried a little piece and it was also very good.

The final course was a selection from the dessert menu. There were a half dozen items to choose from, and I picked a chocolate cake with the peanut butter ice cream. The chocolate cake had a gooey chocolate center and it was very chocolaty. The peanut butter ice cream was also delicious. Janet had a different type of chocolate cake with chocolate mousse.

The meal was excellent, we saw some original artwork, and we got to see five different water shows.

I looked around the restaurant as we were eating and I noticed that some people had ordered the same things we had (not surprising) but didn’t get the wine pairings; they ordered a bottle of red wine. It’s times like that you just want to go up to not-so-perfect strangers and ask them what the hell are they thinking? If you order one bottle of wine with your five-course meal, one of two things will happen: either the food will overpower the wine and you won’t taste what the wine maker intended (thereby wasting the money you spent on the wine) or the wine will overpower the food and you won’t taste what the chef made, and you waste the money you spent on the food.

If you’re going to go to a top restaurant, get the wine pairings. The wines are selected to match the flavor of the food. Not only do you get the best flavors, you get variety in the wine you drink, and you save money. Wine pairings are cheaper than a moderately (restaurant) priced bottle of wine.
Picasso
Bellagio - 3600 S. Las Vegas Blvd
Las Vegas, NV 89109
(702) 948-6937

We arrived in Las Vegas on Sunday afternoon after a bumpy flight.  The hot air coming off of the desert hills makes the approach to Las Vegas interesting.  The weather was a bit warm, about 100 degrees and we hopped into our cab and went to Treasure Island.  I hate TI’s new sign.

After checking in we walked around a bit. We walked down to one of the malls and found an entertainment-oriented store.  They had Simpsons cels, old photos, etc.  We’ve been looking for a Shrek picture to go with The Simpsons “Garden of Springfield” cel and the Monsters Inc. picture that we have in the family room.  We’ve been searching for at least a year.  On Sunday we found two Shrek pictures that we liked and bought one.  It looks like a scene from the original movie and shows Shrek and Donkey in front of Shrek’s house.  It’s autographed by Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy.  The picture we didn’t buy was Shrek and Fiona coming out of Shrek’s house.  I think it was from the second movie.  It was autographed by Myers and Cameron Diaz.

After buying our Shrek picture w went over to Caesar’s for dinner and a show.  Dinner was at a Japanese restaurant and it was pretty good.  They had Kobe beef available but I wasn’t about to spend that much money on it.

Janet had tickets for the Celine Dion show.  She had assumed that they would be sold out but I checked online last month and found that they had tickets available in all price ranges.  She picked up two of the cheapest seats available and they were still $80 per ticket.  The seats were pretty good but it came out to $1.00 per minute of show.  Overall, I was not impressed.  I’ve never cared for her style of music and I thought that her voice was seriously lacking depth.  Like I told Rick when I saw him, that show was the longest year of my life.  The stage mechanisms were interesting.

On Monday Janet did some work while I played some cards.  This wasn’t a vacation for her; she had meetings to attend on Tuesday and Wednesday.  After she finished up reading her email and reviewing documents we did some more walking around.  We went down to the Monet exhibit at Bellagio where they had about 20 paintings on display.  I liked it, but Janet was disappointed because she had seen a much larger show with more famous works in San Francisco and she was expecting more.

Lunch was at Taqueria Canonita in the Venetian.  They’ve got a pork dish that they slow roast for 11 hours that’s really good.  They also have a unique chili relleno that’s worth trying.  We’ve eaten at Taqueria Canonita several times and have never been disappointed. 

After lunch we went over to Madame Tussauds wax museum.  I should have brought my camera because we could have had our picture taken with the likes of Lucille Ball, Patrick Stewart, Mohammed Ali, and many others.  They did take our picture with Elvis but it didn’t turn out very well so we didn’t buy it.

Dinner was at Picasso in Bellagio.  I’ll write up more later, but the food was fantastic.  I’ve never been a fan of Picasso’s work and I’m still not, but it was pretty impressive eating dinner with $55,000,000 worth of artwork.

Tuesday while Janet was working I walked down to MGM to try and find a pith helmet.  No luck.  I tried the shop at the lion display at the MGM, the store at the Rainforest Café, the Grand Canyon store, and a hat store in the Desert Passage mall at Aladdin. The hat store in the Desert Passage mall had some nice hats but not the pith helmet that I was looking for.  I decided to bring Janet back with me and let her help me pick out an alternate hat. 

Tuesday afternoon I spent some time with brother Richard.  We had lunch at a BBQ place then spent a few hours playing with his dogs Sierra and Tahoe.  They’re real beauties and super friendly.

Dinner Tuesday night was with some of Janet’s coworkers and again we ate at Taqueria Canonita in the Venetian.  After dinner Janet and I walked over to the hat store in the Desert Passage mall and picked out a couple of hats — one for each of us — to use when we go hiking through the hills of the Santa Clara County park system, and through Yosemite in a couple of months.  They’re really nice hats.

After Janet bought a battery-powered poodle we stopped in an art store.  They had a picture that we really liked.  It was a library scene with books on one side, and ladders to other worlds on the other side.  It was really nice.  I asked the clerk the price and he brought the picture into the back room and sat us down.  We talked awhile (the picture was really expensive) then said that he could give us a deal because the artist just happened to be in town this week, and he would give her a call.  He did, and came back with a lower price.  This whole thing reminded me of car salesmen who has to go talk to the manager about the price of the car you want to buy.  We left without buying.

Wednesday I just hung out while Janet worked.  Then we flew home (it was another bumpy flight near Las Vegas) and greeted our puppies who missed us immensely.

I wish I knew the name of the person or people who installed my sprinkler system.  Then I could curse them better.  I’ve been spending a lot of time on the weekends doing repairs and I’m not happy with some of the decisions that they made.

Most of the system uses PVC pipe.  That’s fine, but some of the plastic pieces, specifically for the drip system that they installed at the side of the house are old, brittle and broken.  The result was that we had some really nice fountains, and some of our plants never got any water.  One of our cherry trees looked really sad, and we had a bare patch were the plants had died.  I hate drip systems — I don’t know why, I just do — so I decided to replace the drips with posts and shrub sprinkler heads.  That way my new plants would get water and I wouldn’t have to run drip lines everywhere.

I found at least two places where instead of proper tops on the pipes that had outlets for the drip pipe, they put PVC caps over the pipe, drilled a hole in the top of the cap, and glued in the drip line.  One of those came loose and was the source of one of our more spectacular fountains.  Would it have hurt them to spend a couple of bucks on a proper top with a built-in outlet for the drip?

One of the caps was glued to a very short PVC stem and screwed into the underground metal pipe.  I didn’t realize that until after I got it off and dirt flowed into the pipe.  I ended up turning on the sprinkler to clear the dirt out, then while the water was flowing screwed a new stem on the pipe.  At least it was 85 degrees out so I didn’t mind the bath.

On the side of house next to the driveway we’ve got a broken PVC pipe where a tree root pushed it out of place.  Actually the pipe didn’t break, the root forced one end of a pipe away from the connector.  When I took a look at it I discovered that they didn’t run the pipe ends close enough together so the connector didn’t provide any support to one end of the pipe.  I still have that line turned off.  One of these days I’m going to buy a short length of pipe, use the two break repair kits I’ve got, and try to get that line back in service; assuming I can get the pipes lined up again with the root in the way.  If they had connected the pipes correctly the first time, the connection probably wouldn’t have broken.

In the back yard near the house we have a series of shrub sprinklers on posts.  Months ago one of the dogs cut a corner and took one of the sprinklers out.  I bought a stem puller to try and unscrew the broken stem from the T connection.  I found out that the T connection they used wasn’t threaded for the stem.  They had glued the stem to the underground line.  I managed to scrape out enough of the stem to get a female connector attached to the stem.  I also put in a pop-up sprinkler to counter the dogs.  I just hope they don’t take out any of the others; I don’t think they will because only the one they broke is on a well-traveled path.

The front yard is a mix of both old metal pop-up sprinklers and a new plastic version.  One of these days I need to replace the metal pop-ups with new sprinklers because the old ones don’t pop up high enough anymore.

Of course the sprinklers in the vegetable garden had problems, usually age-related and those were easy to repair and we did that months ago.  There was an elbow joint that only existed to run a drip to one plant.  The elbow was broken and spouted water all over the place.  It got replaced with another shrub sprayer and all the plants next to the air conditioner are happy now.  I just wish they had made the T connection at least close to perpendicular to the ground.  The stem I put in cants at about 20 degrees off vertical because they just popped in the connection and didn’t line it up.

Ah, the joys of home ownership.

Space.com has an article detailing John Kerry’s answers to space exploration issues.  I agree with a lot of what Kerry says, and disagree with some of his statements.

I agree that the Bush vision is under funded.  Bush thinks that NASA will have extra money after completing the space station in 2010 and even more money available by retiring the shuttle fleet.  There might be some money available, but I suspect it won’t be a lot.  You still need to have ground support operations, re-supply missions, equipment upgrades, hardware repairs, software maintenance, new science experiments, and so on.  When the shuttle is retired another launch vehicle must take its place.  If history is any indication, a new NASA-developed launch vehicle won’t be significantly cheaper to fly than what it’s going to replace.

I disagree with Kerry’s emphasis on microgravity research on such items as pharmaceuticals over developing ways for humans to live and work in space for long periods of time.  The spin-off technology from developing ways for humans to survive in that hostile environment include advances in radiation shielding, water purification, air purification, medical diagnostic systems, food production, power systems, and so on.  Both efforts are important to improving life on earth.

I also have some problems with Kerry’s praise of Clinton’s efforts in this area.  Yes, there were dozens of successful shuttle flights during the Clinton administration but a Columbia-type accident could have happened at any time.  The accident may have been more likely to happen because Clinton cut the NASA budget.

Kerry also praises the Clinton Administration with cutting in half the time and money needed to develop space missions, including missions to Mars.  The “better-faster-cheaper” mantra was a disaster for space exploration.  Mars is littered with millions of dollars worth of debris because program developers were forced to cut corners.  Clinton was no friend to the civilian space program.

The jury is still out on which candidate would be better for science, space, and technology development although Bush’s opposition to stem cell research is a huge black mark against him.