Monday, July 2, 2018

Celebrating Anniversaries With Fine Dining


So, we have been married a long time, 63 years and counting. Throughout that time, we have developed a tradition of combining fine dining with our celebratory moods. So, here is a little summary of our culinary celebrations over a 63 year time period, beginning in that little town of Spring Valley, New York. Note that we flew from New York to California the day after we were married. 

July 2, 1955 – Wedding at Spring Valley church, dinner-reception at Carol’s folks’ house in Nanuet.

July 2, 1956 – Dinner with Ruth & Niels at their home in Millbrae, CA
July 2, 1957 – After one unhappy year living in Garden Grove, CA, while I worked at Firestone Guided Missile Division in LA, we moved back to Northern California. We again had dinner with Ruth & Niels at their home.
July 2, 1958 – Dinner at a sweet little restaurant in Menlo Park, CA.
July 2, 1959 – Dinner at home at our new Sunnyvale (pre-Silicon Valley) home, which we purchased for $17,000 (3BR, 2Bath ranch style).
July 2, 1960 – Dinner at Ernie’s in San Francisco. Splendid meal, fancy restaurant. I should note here that San Francisco was so rich in restaurants, that Carol and I would traverse weekly from our Sunnyvale home to some restaurant in the city. We occasionally would select a restaurant at random from the phone book just to test the theory that San Francisco restaurants were simply the best everywhere. Largely, the tactic was successful.

July 2, 1961 – Dinner at The Blue Fox in San Francisco, even fancier, maybe the most expensive place in San Francisco.
July 2, 1962 – Dinner at a Russian restaurant atop Nob Hill, across from our apartment at 1242 Sacramento Street, SF.
July 2, 1963 – Dinner at an Italian restaurant in North Beach, SF. Later, a coffee at Enrico’s coffee House.
July 2, 1964 – Dinner outdoors at the St. George’s Hotel in Beirut, overlooking the Mediterranean. We were enroute to New Delhi, India. 
July 2, 1965 – Dinner in Old Delhi at Moti Mahal’s—Tandoori Chicken cooked by the experts.
July 2, 1966 – Dinner on a river boat restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand, enroute home on home leave.
July 2, 1967 – Dinner outdoors at a café on Mykonos, Greece, overlooking the sea and the windmills. Now we also had an amazing dinner at an outdoor restaurant atop Mt. Lykavittos, where, from the top you can dine outdoors, drink some nice Greek wine, maybe a retsina, and observe the Acropolis where, when we were there, there was an ongoing son-et-lumiere.

July 2, 1968 – Having traversed Europe, stopping in Moscow to see the Bolshoi Ballet do Swan Lake at the Bolshoi Theatre, and cruising through England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, and then sailing back to New York, we arrived in Manhattan by boat with our brand new Rover 2000TC, and our three kids intact and were greeted by Carol’s folks, and my brother and his wife at the harbor. We dined at a splendid harbor restaurant, and drank from a bottle of 1959 Chateau Lafitte Rothschild to celebrate our anniversary.

July 2, 1969 – Having decided that one year of snow storms in Boston was adequate for a lifetime, we moved to the Washington DC area. We moved for a couple of months to Chincoteague, and celebrated our anniversary at Chincoteague, where we also watched, with close friends, the first moon landing—Flat Earthers be gone.

July 2, 1970 – Ok, having moved into Bethesda, which is adjacent to Washington, DC, we now were faced with many choices for our anniversary dinners.  Initially, Georgetown was our favorite location. We had an amazing creperie, Maison Des Crepe, a fine Greek restaurant, a really, really expensive Italian restaurant—we once spent $350 there for dinner for two (the wine was really expensive).  So, between 1970 and 1990, we alternated frequently at Georgetown restaurants for our anniversaries (no, the $350 one was a one-off). Then during the late 1970s, we began also to go to Bethesda restaurants, as the restaurant trade there really picked up. Basically, what happened was that the subway came through from DC to beyond Bethesda in 1973 and, all of a sudden, DC was a simple subway ride away, with no expensive car parking or DC traffic. And Bethesda real estate boomed, along with Bethesda restaurants.  We went in not many years from maybe 3-4 restaurants, to over 100.  We dined frequently, weekly really at our favorite Italian restaurant, The Pines of Rome. But for anniversaries, we went slightly more upscale. But both DC and Bethesda were “restaurant-rich”, so we mainly remained in our home territory for anniversaries.

1981 – I cannot remember now whether this was an anniversary dinner, but it was close and a memorable experience. Carol’s mom, Nana was her nom-de-plume for our kids, had worked as a little kid at a restaurant her grandfather started—she used to shuck oysters at the age of 7. The restaurant was Gage and Tollner, located in Brooklyn on Fulton Street, It was opened during the 1880s and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.  The place had gas lamps, so it could remain open during a blackout.  We took Nana there for her 75th birthday.  The place looked the same to her and it was an amazing dining experience for all.  Unhappily, it changed owners multiple times, and then simply closed for good.  But we were lucky to have dined at that wonderful historic restaurant that was a part of Carol’s family.

July 2, 2000 – yes we are skipping forward in time, now to capture our move to Concord, North Carolina, and my pseudo-retirement. In theory, I retired in 2000. In practice, two of my clients insisted that I continue to consult with them, which I did on at least a monthly basis until 2007, when I declared myself done with my consulting business, and schlepping up to DC and New York.  

Initially, when we moved into Concord, there was a dearth of fine restaurants. We really had to travel, maybe to Charlotte, or to a few up in Salisbury, NC. The area was not DC or Bethesda, and represented something new for us, since we had always lived within a minor drive to a rich array of fine restaurants. See, dining out, especially at anniversaries was one of our several traditions.  

Then we began doing a bit of traveling at anniversary time.  And we discovered one of the world’s great treats, a village in Canada named Niagara on the Lake. It is located about five miles from the falls, and on the confluence of the Niagara River and Lake Ontario. The village is physically lovely, with gardens and flowers everywhere. It also has three theatres devoted to the Shaw festival. The theatres put on plays by George Bernard Shaw and Shaw contemporaries.  The performances are amazing. The village is also surrounded by fine wineries, which can be visited with a short drive. It also has wonderful inns, B&Bs, restaurants and little shoppes within which one may satisfy the urge for lovely things.

We managed to visit there on several occasions, and we dined at more than one of the estate wineries. For our 50th, our 55th, and our 60th, we celebrated our anniversaries at the Peller Estate Winery. They offer wine pairing dinners, which are both fun and tasty. We also always managed to bring home boxes of wine.  This of course was when Canadians still thought of Americans in kindly ways, before our President so crudely declared a state of economic warfare existed. But he is a profoundly stupid man.

June 30th, 2018 – we managed to celebrate our anniversary a bit early by dining at our now favorite restaurant, Gianni’s in downtown Concord.  We had a wonderful meal, courtesy of Heather, the amazing chef at Gianni’s. And both Heather and John greeted us during our meal, and John brought us each a glass of champagne. We chatted, ate amazing food and generally felt special, which is how we always feel at Gianni’s. I liken the restaurant to Cheers, where everyone knows your name.

July 2, 2018 – And so, for our actual anniversary dinner, we are going to our son-in-law’s brewery, the Cabarrus Brewing Company in Concord, another place where we can truthfully say, everyone knows our name. The brewery is a special place, filled with wonderful and highly varied beers, interesting food and always a welcoming atmosphere.  So, there, a little summary of many anniversaries and much fine dining at special places. Let the tradition continue.





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