Friday, March 24, 2017

i know i could stay here all night

Blog is v. v. late tonight (it's 2am in London town) because I had a v. v. fancy dinner with the original Jen Lui. But first, I had to survive my day, which started entirely too early - I had stupidly agreed to go to the community breakfast at 8am, which means I woke up at 7:45am feeling like death and threw on some pants and some mascara in an attempt to look human.

Breakfast was at the Ivy Chelsea Garden, which was entirely delightful. I got the least instagrammable thing on the menu which was some scrambled eggs on top of smoked salmon, but it was the dish that made my heart and stomach happy, so #noregrets. And the community aspect was fun, although I am really not fit company for anyone until I've had caffeine and at least an hour to wake up, so I was perhaps a little too 'real' (or as Penny the Australian documentary filmmaker said at some point, very casually, "You're a hard woman and I like it"...which I think was a compliment, but also could have meant I went too aggressive with the snark. Ymmv.).

Then we came back here, and I worked most of the day with limited actual results but lots of mental exercise. I also took a nap in deference to my tiredness, had some peanut butter toast for lunch while talking to Strong Michael (the Irish personal trainer, who also commented that my claws had come out...perhaps I should ponder all of this tomorrow, although in this case it was definitely a joke), and talked to [censored] for quite awhile, since we were overdue for a catch-up.

And then I showered, made myself more presentable, and went to St Pancras to meet up with Jen before dinner. I was running slightly late, and then she was dealing with work stuff, so we didn't have time to go to a bar before dinner (a 9pm reservation!), but this was probably for the best. We went to the Clove Club, which is as fancy as our usual fanciness (probably fancier, since this restaurant was just named the best in the UK). We started off with a cocktail while waiting for our table, but we didn't have to wait long (we were early, in their defense)...

...and then we ate for well over two hours. Jen had apparently booked the seven course tasting menu, which was pretty spectacular - we decided to split a wine pairing, which means they gave us each a half pour of the wines for all seven courses, which was perfect since neither of us wanted to get drunk (which we certainly would have if we'd had seven glasses of wine each). The wines were all delightful, the food was universally excellent (although my favorite may have been one of the chicken tenders to start, even though it was entirely too posh and presented on top of a bed of fresh evergreen branches), and they gave us a bit of madeira that was laid down in 1908 and kept in a barrel for eighty years before being bottled...

And now I'm dreaming of other stories and other worlds, and a restaurant mostly staffed by ghosts, since many of the servers seemed to be from another time and place.

But we ended the night without them realizing that I was writing a book about them in my head - instead, one of the waiters ended up finding out that I write romance novels, and then he told the bartender, and they all thought that 'Taking the Earl' is a hilarious title, and they wanted me to send them a postcard from Venice. Yes, this is how I roll.

Then Jen and I took an uber to her hotel, and we parted ways after a wonderful evening/week, and then I continued on to my hotel, where I needed a nap before I could contemplate the thought of washing my face and writing the blog. And now I need to sleep - goodnight!

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