Wednesday 13 January 2010

No Good Deed

Conan O'Brien gets the gold star for today.

If you haven't yet been to Birch & Barley/Churchkey, do yourself a favor and go. We ate a genuine meal there for the first time last night, having done only small plates before. Of course we had no idea it was the first night of restaurant week, we're complete amateurs. My brother was in town and I thought it'd be cool to take him to a place I had a hand in putting together. The back of house staff has it together, they've fully hit their stride. The only minor gripe was that the parsnip soup was a shade salty for my taste, but I could easily go with the pork cheeks and grits 2 or 3 meals a day ad infinitum. I'd need to order bigger kit, though. They also have the beer part pretty nailed. The recommended pour pairings were all good, although the Ommegang Chocolate Stout, which wasn't a pairing for anything we ordered, was the all star beer of the evening. The Kasteel Tripel was a solid runner up. The front of house staff is great, they know their shit and keep things running solid. And Big Drew behind the bar upstairs is all star.

I nearly turned into a cautionary tale on Monday evening while lifting. Doing some hack squats with considerably less weight than I've been using the last couple of months (I'm off of the strength building stage), my knees just totally buckled and I folded like a cheap suit. Knees don't feel all that awesome, but shit it could have been bad. No clue why it happened.

Today's title was meant to refer to something that had me feeling a little salty yesterday, but I'm not feeling it anymore. I got to hang out last night with my brother who I don't get to see a whole lot, got treated like a freaking king by people I'd worked with and was impressed as hell with where they've gotten to, get to work with the same group again for the next six months, I'm on the coolest team I could imagine for the coming year, a bunch of the relationships that I was worried about in leaving my old team have been strengthened by a lot, training is going well, and I'm about to spend the weekend kicking ass in WV where it actually appears the weather might be other than the brutal nut-shriveling mayhem we've been subject to lately. The view's pretty good right now.

(that eerie silence you're hearing is the sound of the world trying not to foreshadow how next it will kick me in the nuts)

2 comments:

fpg said...

i beg to differ about your beer ranking, i'd have to go with the Adventinus as a strong no. 2.

Karen said...

pork cheeks....yum. I'm seriously jealous, after a great dinner of home made bean soup and Penfolds Shiraz-Cab... and my knees hurt, too...from running, and too much Penfolds.