Weird Appetizer and a Movie

First, I would like to say that none of the following should be taken as a criticism of dear reader Julie. She got this evening together. The companionship was lovely. But some experiences are just so much more intesting for their blogworthiness.

Good Soup and a Movie was put on hiatus for a night at the High watching a foreign film. I need to say that I love doing stuff like this. I love the city of Atlanta, but don't spend nearly enough time in it. I want to spend more evenings doing high falutin' stuff.

So, The Polyglot and I met Julie and Affable Olive at the High's restaurant - Table 1280. Traffic was a little worse than I expected it to be and I got a tad turned around because I'm not used to coming into the city from the north. We were much later than we should have been to meet them. Oh well. It all worked out.

Table 1280 is a neat place. The overall feel is very consistent with the decor of the museum. One whole wall of the smallish dining room features an "art" piece of ginormous mixing bowls attached to the wall (with the convex side sticking out towards you). The tables, floor and chairs are blonde wood. It looks very ... sterile.

The menu is full of items that sound vaguely familiar, but I have no idea how they are prepared. For example, Berkshire Pork means that the pork is sliced. OK. They had to named sliced pork after a city in England? Are the inhabitants of Berkshire porcine genuises? Were they the first people to slice pork before serving it? Wow. That's a culinary revolution. Anyway, the Berkshire Pork was good, the almost not viscous pototoes were tasty (but seriously how can you make potatoes taste bad?), the rhubarb was pretty and the onions smelled nice.

But it was the appetizer that sticks in my craw, if not in my belly. I wanted a salad, but was leary of the vinaigrette dressing because I wasn't in the mood for a sweet dressing. After I asked about a salad and hesitated about the waiter's answer, the waiter then asked if I liked Mozarella cheese. Duh, who doesn't? He pointed to the last appetizer, I noticed the $14 price tag, but ordered it anyway. ($14 is more than I pay for a whole dinner at the thai place!)

The waiter set my appetizer down in front of me. I thought my meal had come with a little piece of art to take home as a memento. It sure didn't look like a salad - it barely looked like food. It was basically a piece of bread with a couple of hunks of tomatoes, some spices, an enormous poof of something they tried to pass off as mozarella cheese, a couple of sprigs of grass freshly picked from outside (I swear I saw dirt hanging from the end of one of those stalks) and some pale colored stuff (perhaps dead grass they've been preserving in the kitchen - a nice Winter '04 harvest). The whole concoction was circled by little dots of ruby lipstick. That particular shade of lipstick wouldn't go with our waiter's complexion, so he must have borrowed it from one of the other waiters, perhaps the sweet thang who sat us. To top it all off, the whole thing tasted like raspberry vinaigrette dressing.

During dinner, the other three looked out the window (to the main piazza of the High Museum) and saw a dude walk by in an interesting outfit. Their reactions were so immediate, that I had to turn around for a gander. I saw half a second of a man in a sear-sucker sport coat and very loud electric green shoes. That was enough time to realize that I know this man. He's a coworker. Nothing he wears will ever shock me. He wore those shoes to the office on St. Patrick's Day - with other articles of green clothing that did not match (but then again, I don't think anything matches those shoes).

I'm going to stop here and let you digest all of this. The movie deserves it's own blog entry.