Fancy night out

Will’s officer candidate training is nearly over, he only has 2 weeks in August to go. Last night was a celebratory dinner for the candidates, the TAC officers and everyones’ spouses. The alpha male of Will’s class decided that they needed a super fancy restaurant to celebrate in. So we ended up in Morton’s Steakhouse.

We had to dress up, and had the truck valet parked. The only funny part of all of that was that once again, Will ended up with the artillery shell, which he had to tote around (into the restaurant.)

Since we were a large party we had a nice separate room, with pretty decent service. There was a smaller menu that we had to pick from. There was chopped salad and appetizers. They kept pouring fancy water from fancy glass bottles (which we later found out cost $7.50 a bottle!) They brought out the steak, Will had prime rib eye, and I chose the filet mignon. Honestly for $35 a steak you would think it would be the best steak IN THE WORLD, right? It wasn’t. Will said his was in the top three best steaks he has ever had, but it was tied with rib eye we have had from Costco (on multiple occasions, that is the best steak for the money.) I think my filet paled in comparison to a filet I once had from New Frontier, the piece of steak was like butter on my tongue, it melted almost immediately when it came in contact with my saliva. I still think of it fondly. At Morton’s they give you a béarnaise sauce to put on your filet mignon, why? If the steak is delectable and juicy why do they need to burden its flavor with a funky sauce? I tried the sauce on it, but didn’t find it to my liking. The sauce is very similar to a pan sauce I make for chicken (that Rhayn likes, it’s a vermouth tarragon sauce, quite tasty if I do say so myself, but their sauce, I just don’t know what was weird about it, and I don’t think I would want it again.)

Then there was dessert, Will had cheesecake and I had Chocolate Velvet cake, it was so rich, but lacking. Seriously a little raspberry sauce would have done both desserts justice. Their cheesecake was light and airy, I prefer the denser richer cheesecake, like from the Cheesecake factory (not that I have eaten there- it was the frozen kind from Costco.)

So the bill comes, and I hadn’t thought about that at all. It was pricey, I mean seriously pricey. Mr. Alpha Male gets huffy because they messed up the bill. He had put $200 down for reservation of the room, and wanted that to go to his bill and the rest to go towards gratuity. But the waiter had taken the $200 off of all the bills collectively and he had still gotten a bill. So they take the bills back, and redo them. Which should have made all bills increase THE SAME, right? They didn’t, some increased by $50 and ours actually went down (admittedly ours went down because we hadn’t ordered wine, but it was on our first bill.) Still it was a billing fiasco! We spent an hour waiting for them to get it all figured out, and THEN they had to go through and figure out who ordered what to give them the correct bill. It was madness, crazy, madness!

I don’t think I enjoyed “playing rich” because I just didn’t feel like we got that much value for our money. It was nice to dress up, but really I felt out of my element there. We just aren’t $50 plus a plate people! Maybe the intense flavors you have in Indian curries has ruined my palate, but that expensive food was totally lacking in character.