Greg and Tina's Birthday Extravaganza

The restaurant is Fleur de Sel, fairly near our apartment, and I've wanted to try it for ages. This year, Greg made the reservation. By the time Saturday night rolled around, we'd been looking forward to our birthday dinner for 3 weeks and expectations were terribly high. The restaurant itself was incredibly warm and we were there for almost 4 hours. In the end, we spent just about TWICE our monthly grocery budget on one meal--a somewhat daunting amount and we've regretted spending less than half that on a birthday dinner.

This meal, this experience, was totally and completely worth every penny.

Six course tasting menu with wine pairings. Two choices for all but the cheese course. Between us, we tried everything on the menu--11 different dishes. 11 different wines. The food itself was very, very good. The food in conjunction with the wine pairings was absolute genius. The wine brought out the best in the food and vice versa. (Even the way dessert wines were excellent with the food and we hate them as a rule.) I won't bore you with the complete run-down of all 11 dishes, but will give some of the highlights:

Spanish makeral tartare, creme fresh, American paddlefish caviar with a french white--the combination of tartare, creme and caviar was really great.

Fluke with couscous with dried cranberries and pine nuts with port sauce, Chateauneuf-du-Pape--absolutely brilliant.

Wild Striped Bass with spinach and fingerling potatoes with balsamic sauce, something also red--also incredible.

New Zealand Venison (medium rare) with a smoked sausage/celery root gratin that was completely inspired, served with a red wine sauce. With this there was a Long Island Cabernet franc that was unbelievable, really herbal/piney smelling, with an incredibly buttery mouth feel.

Cheese Course: Vermont cow's milk cheese (very Manchego-like) with quince paste, seriously aged balsamic and caraway toasts--I remember nothing about the red that accompanied it other than it was very good. Oh, and the caraway toasts arrived in bed--seriously, they were lying on a folded napkin on a plate that made it appear that they were tucked between the sheets. It was quite adorable.

Dessert Course:
Tina: banana mouse and cafe creme. Totally covered with whipped cream, so you never knew what flavor you were getting next--wine was a semillon that was standard dessert wine (yucky) on it's own, but when sipped after a bite of the dessert, tasted like liquid caramel.
Greg: dark chocolate gaufrette (crispy cookie) with chocolate ganache and chocolate ice cream. Here too there were different areas of flavor in the creams, some sweet, some bitter/savory, so you never got used to the taste. His dessert wine was a red that seemed like an extension of the chocolate when they were consumed together.

We left pleasantly full, but not stuffed, and quite happily drunk. Hopefully, this will give you some idea of the glory, but after two days, the details of a meal that lasted 4 hours, included six courses, not to mention six glasses of wine, become foggy. Really, really foggy. We got home after midnight, drunk as lords, contemplating giving up all other food for two months at a stretch so we could afford to do it again on a regular basis.