SoHo kicks so much ass. *dies in happy tuna bliss*
So. It's got a wall of windows, but every restaurant has one of those, and there are these funky floor to ceiling doorway thingeedoodads along one side...the bar is in the middle of the front part of the restaurant- it runs perpendicular to the street- the bar, not the restaurant, which really runs sideways. It's got lots of low level lighting, and they play soft atmosphere jazz in the background. As you walk in, the desk is immediately to your right, the wall of windows and the street to your left (you make a 90^ turn in the foyer (where they have many wine bottles)) and there's a set of short stairs leading down to the back half of the restaurant, where you can see the kitchen, which also runs sideways and has a wall of windows. So it looks cool.

But the food- oh, blessed all! Not a single entree under twenty bucks except for the veggie platter, (vegetable sample with porcini risotto) and that was 18. The appetizers were $7-9, and I think the salads were all around $12 or $14 bucks. So. My meal:

We decided to split the spinach salad, which had young and tender spinach with chuncks of crumbled blue chese and curls of what I think was candied lemon rind and dried currants sprinkled about. I'm not sure what the dressig was, but it was tangy and good and tasted of blue cheese. We also split an appetizer; the goat cheese fritter, served on top of a pile of red and green vegetables sliced translucently thin drizzled in a sweet fruit-tasting sauce topped with a pile of greenery that resembled orregano, only not. Mark kept spreading his goat cheese on bread; I scooped it up with the red and green stuff and it was five different kinds of excellent. A little on the sweet side, but you don't expect things like 'goat cheese fritters' to be all that appealing. It was serious good stuff.

Then the entree; now, I will literally eat anything that is not moving, unless it's clams or mussels and in that case they'd better be cut up and hidden in some sauce before you expect me to put them in my mouth. (Truamatic experience with a live clam while in France- I'm serious about the not-moving rule.) I will also eat whatever it is at a record speed- bad habit, but it happens, and while everyone else is half way through their potatoes, I'll be wiping up the last of my gravy with a bit of bread. But this= this was food you couldn't help but eat slowly. I literally could not rush this meal, it was that good. I had decided that I wasn't particularly hungry, and Matt often gushes about it, so I ordered the tuna. Mark had the veal. The dishes come and wow.

Half the fun of eating at these insanely expensive restaurants is in the presentation of the food. The other half is the taste. My tuna came barely cooked around the edges and sushi-raw in the middle, just barely warm enough to keep from clashing with the warmth of the sauce; porcini dusted on the outside and tender enough to eat with a spoon, all lined up in half inch slices on top of a pile of parchment brown mushrooms with a texture like filet mignon and a taste that was out of this world. You know the kind of mushrooms I'm talking about, the kind they don't sell in the grocery store down the street; you've got to go to Wegmann's or some other huge place that sells them for eighty dollars a pound. They taste like clouds and acid trips, only without the mind bending consequences. And then there were the potato gnocci, hidden under the tuna and nestled in with the mushrooms, each no bigger than the last joint of my little finger, tender and seasoned faintly with something like parsely but probably wasn't; not the kind of gnocci that settles in your stomach like a lump of lead, the kind that melt on your tongue and leave the happy memory of a potato that went on to better things in your mouth. And the sauce- perfection. Tangy and sweet but not overly so, a blending of tastes that's impossible to describe with any other word than exquisite.

There was no sauce on the fish, just on the bed of mushrooms, gnocci and (oddly enough) green peas and around the plate. The tuna was sliced into vague rectangle shapes and lined up diagonally with a cap of tomato on one end and a bundle of assorted greenery tied (tied! with a knot and everything!) together by a strand of green onion. Beautiful.

Mark had the veal, which came as two cylinders of perfectly cooked and seasoned meat, one swimming in the blood-orange sauce, the other perched on top of a structure made of asparagus and fried yucca stalks- I had rectangular tuna, he had Lincoln logs. The veal was excellent, but the tuna was beyond good.

Then dessert: we split the apple streudle and the banna bread pudding- again, the presentation was half the fun. The apple streudle looked like an apple egg roll, quite honestly. Two halves of a roll standing on end with the upper half sliced diagonally, a cluster of walnuts and a pool of green apple syrup in one corner flanked by neatly arranged quarter inch cubes of candied apple in red apple syrup, and a tiny scoop of apple icecream on top of an apple slice as thin as a sheet of paper, with another apple slice sticking upwards out of it like a rising sun. (To be honest, I didn't think much of it- the apples weren't tart enough and I thought the pastry to be a little tough- the currants were a nice touch though. And the apple slices were shiny.) The banana bread pudding was Mark's fault. It was banana and poppy seed ice cream with a poppy seed tuille (it's a funky cookie), a line of sliced bananas with caramel, and the pudding, a mass of banana's and cake and eggs and cream and poppy seeds swimming in caramel. And yes, it was incredibly, wonderfully, intensely good. And if Matt hadn't decided that Mark's banana poppy seed cake was good, it probably wouldn't have been on the menu. My brother inspires great things. Coo'.

The final bill came to about $90, I believe. We left thirty bucks on the table, thanked Matt, and left. It pays to have connections in the restaurant biz, it really does. Tomorrow we go to one of the other insanely expensive restaurants in New Brunswick. Only we'll have to pay. *pout* But still- like, whoa. I haven't eaten that well since the Italian restaurant in Copenhagen- best Italian food of my life, and it was in Denmark. Craziness. But this was better, even if it was only three courses and not five.

I've told people that I take nothing seriously; I lied. I take my food very seriously. *sigh* I am happy.