La Notte

This begins my week in Vancouver. From the perspective of writing a cookbook, this is total dead time. From the perspective of guy simply trying to eat something different every day of the year, this is a wonderful break from day to day cooking. The plan is basically to visit with my west coast friends and visit some nice restaurants along the way. We've got a reservation at Feenie's this weekend, but other than that we'll sort of play it by ear.

When I arrived my friend Simon, who is housing me for the week, picked me up at the airport. We took the bus downtown to an Indian restaurant called Maurya's that had an all you can eat lunch buffet. We were a bit late to get prime pickin's. The meat dishes were basically leftover sauce with a few chunks at the bottom if wanted to try your hand at fishing. No matter, the rest of the buffet was good. For some reason I took second helpings of the dish I liked the least; some mushroom dish that had a lot of cilantro in it. I think instead of conditioning myself to like cilantro, I've just conditioned myself to eat it forcefully. The naan was really nice, crispy and flaky and the mango dressing I used for my greens was quite pleasant.

For dinner we met up with a few of Simon's buddies and went to La Notte, an Italian place with half price pasta Tuesdays. I had the fettuccine con osso buco, which was a nicely braised veal shank with mushrooms and a red wine tomato sauce and parmesan cheese. The pasta was good and the meat was good, but the sauce was really watery and not particularly flavorful. I guess I could've remedied it with more cheese, but I just left a portion of the noodles on my plate. I also consciously ate marrow for the first time, which is nothing what I pictured it to be like, sort of like a veal flavored gelatin. Afterwards we went and played a few hands of mah-jong, where Simon decimated us with some ridiculously high point hand.