For Abby's birthday, we had the pleasure of dining at Esca, Mario Batali's seafood-heavy restaurant on 43rd Street in New York. I've been a big fan of the dishes at Mario's other places in New York, having been to Otto more times than I can count (since it's by work, see my earlier post on that) and have been to a majority of his restaurants, many before I became a foodie and knew where I was. While I've had a few pasta dishes at times that weren't "al dente" but "al uncooked" generally everything is wonderful.
Abby's been repeating the story that we "had dinner with Tony Bennett" which is true to the same degree that we had dinner with every other patron in the restaurant who was there. Of course, Tony (we're THAT close having dined together) was the only famous person at the place, and so I feel we had MORE dinner with him than with anyone else. He sat diagonally across the restaurant with a blonde woman who was either his daughter or date. Very close call on that, and the jury is still out.
When we told this story to my cousin at her graduation dinner the next night, she mentioned she too had seen Tony Bennett, her spotting came in a less intimate setting as Tony performed at the Faith Hill/Tony McGraw concert, which if you ask me signifies that Gozer the Gozarian is en route to end the world.
For me though, I was more jazzed that we sat next to a couple named Lana and Charlie who were celebrating their anniversary at Esca with a free meal. Theirs was free because they're the food purveyor for the produce used at all of Batali's restaurants, plus a handful of other really really well known establishments in New York City. 30,000 people at Madison Square Garden could say they saw Tony Bennett, but how many would say "we saw the people who produce the vegetables for some of the best restaurants in the city"? (Oddly, they too were going to the Faith Hill concert, so I guess everyone at the Garden could say they saw both, if they knew to do so.)
The interesting surprise of the night came when the waiter came over to tell us about the menu (he was about six foot-one-million-feet tall so it was quite hard to hear him) and he pointed out that the first part of the menu consisted of the Crudo, the raw seafood appetizers that are "our version of Sashimi."
Wait a second.
I've been eating sushi for more than 32 years now, having my first experience of it when I was just under four years old. (I was non-plussed at the time, throwing up after the experience. That didn't stop me, I became a real fan very quickly.) During most of the time that I was a sushi eater, most people just had no idea why I liked it. In the last 15 years or so sushi's become big, but I didn't realize how big until the waiter at a fancy Italian place described their raw seafood dishes as being "our version of sashimi".
I know how food-savy New York City is, but it was odd to hear that comparison given, and made me really happy. Not as happy as I'd have been if Tony Bennett came over to sing Happy Birthday to Abby (as she suggested to me that he do) but happy none the less.
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