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It's been years since I last treated my friendly neighborhood prime broker to a nice meal, and with the help they've given me lately, I felt it was high time I did something nice for them.   I wanted to choose a place that isn't too far from the office so that it would be relatively convenient, so I figured Andō would fit the bill pretty nicely.  I haven't been back to see Goldfinger in quite some time so it was time to rectify that situation.

The meal started with a trio of little bites:

Monaka with fruit tomato and jamón ibérico - jamón from Joselito.

Chocolate tart with Manchego and green peas - there wasn't that much Manchego but the smell and flavors were certainly very strong. Nice sweet peas.

Tomato water with zucchini

All my favorites for Sunday

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After the big meals from yesterday, I was hankering for something simple and classic.  We hadn't been back to Ho Hung Kee (何洪記) since late last year, and I kinda missed the classic dishes.  What was even better was that they now have set meals which offer up a number of crowd favorites in one go.

House specialty wonton noodles in soup (正斗鮮蝦雲吞麵) - it doesn't get more classic Cantonese than a bowl of 細蓉. Even though they didn't prop the wontons up with a spoon, they did follow tradition by putting the noodles on top and the wontons at the bottom.

The second stuffing

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A mere four hours after lunch, I'm sitting down for another meal big - this time at my favorite sushi restaurant in town.  Our last dinner here was a few months ago, and I was happy to be back at Sushi Saito (鮨 さいとう).  Once again, we had seats in front of Kubota-san.

Northern purple sea urchin with Japanese green sea urchin (北紫雲丹 と 馬糞雲丹) - with kobuzake (昆布酒) which, unfortunately, kinda changes the flavors of the sea urchins... and actually brings them closer together. The green sea urchin has stronger iodine flavors while the purple sea urchin was more elegant, as I would expect.

Ladies who lunch

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As if my feeding schedule weren't busy enough this week, My Favorite Birdbrain Cousin insisted on buying me lunch.  And she wanted to do it on a day when I already had a big dinner scheduled for an early time slot, which was certainly not ideal.  After some bitching on my part, Sankala was able to move our their lunch at Lobster Bar and Grill to an earlier time slot.

The restaurant is doing their "Shabby Chic" brunch menu, which unfortunately (for people like me) involves free-flow alcohol of different sorts. We were too dumb to understand how the system works in terms of different types of alcohol, so we ended up sticking to the basic version with unlimited martinis.

The reason the ladies wanted to come here was for their seafood platter. It's just one of those things where some people hanker for from time to time, and there were two ambitious people whose eyes opened real wide at the sight of this... I, of course, left this to the two of them.

Double birthday

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The Landlord and I decided to celebrate our birthdays together this year, and of course the venue would be none other than Caprice.  We had the Chef's Table for the night and, as it turns out, almost the whole restaurant to ourselves as the public section was closed for the duration of service.  Half the kitchen team would be downstairs catering for a large wine event.

I didn't ask for any particular dish for the evening, leaving things, as usual, up to Hairy Legs. I love how he continues to surprise me even after all these years.

Button mushroom and foie gras gelée tart - I was happily snapping a pic of this when Hairy Legs decided that he would come and ruin that pretty picture... by shaving some black stuff on top...

Of course, having slices of Tasmanian black truffle with your mushroom and foie gras tart is never a bad thing.