the most wonderful time of the year

date: Jan 19

drink: 2004 Bergevin Lane "Alder Ridge Vineyard" Horse Heaven Hills Cabernet Sauvignon and then something else later

what: Restaurant Week @ Mesa Grill & more wine at Maxie's Grill

i love restaurant week. ever since moving to manhattan, i've loved restaurant week... i've found some of my favorite restaurants that way (tabla & artisanal), determined that others were overrated (tao), and experimented at places i may not have otherwise gone (devi)... sure, there have been one or two misses and others that were forgettable and times when i went in with the best of intentions for ordering off of the RW menu but ended up skipping it, but for me, its always been an excuse to go somewhere nice in the middle of the week and be a bit indulgent...

so last week, while perusing the RW offerings on open table, i saw that i could get a monday night reservation at Mesa Grill, checked their RW menu and decided to go for it... at the time i thought that a monday night reservation might not be my first choice however, it turned out to be an excellent idea as i have been informed that the 3rd monday in january is deemed the 'saddest day of the year', which makes it a great day to go out and cheer yourself up :)

anyway, as life ebbs and flows and your situation changes, sometimes RW is the only way to afford a good meal and other times, the cheaper meal allows you to be a bit more indulgent in your wine selection... last night was the latter... J suggested we get a bottle and while a bottle of wine on a monday night might not sound like the smartest idea in the world, we are nothing if not a couple of drunks, so to us, it sounded like an excellent idea :)

oddly enough, neither of us had really heard of anything on the wine list, but i kept coming back to the wine above based on the location of its vineyard - Horse Heaven Hills, WA... and it fit the bill of not being the cheapest bottle on the menu but a few from that end - which is where i generally order from anyway if i dont recognize anything as being something i like... so based on that silliness, the order was placed.

and now i'm gonna go ahead and recommend a few things... #1, that wine. #2, the cauliflower soup, #3, the spicy cilantro rice that came with the mahi-mahi (with the sauce that came with the mahi mahi as well) and #4, the chocolate flan... but mostly? the wine...

as is bound to happen after a bottle of wine, we werent ready to head home for the night so it was off to metro cafe and wine bar only to find that it was closed, which lead us to end up at Maxie's for one more glass of wine... and some more of those vomit-inducing conversations that lucky-for-the-rest-of-the-world, no one but us has to hear ;)