I have been at 15 Craigside for four Thanksgivings, and each time I've had two Thanksgiving meals. While we have a decent dinner here, I always get invited out, so order take-out to enjoy later.
This year my brother invited me to join his bridge team at Little Village Noodle House for Thanksgiving. He is from Las Vegas and they are in town for a major American Contract Bridge Tournament at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.
Here is his team:
From the left, Yasuo, Sooja, Sun-Hee, Kyung-Won and Dan, my brother. They represent a total of 25,000 master points. You want to know how awesome that is?
- Life Master 300
- Gold Life Master 2500
- Diamond Life Master 5000
We had much, too much, to eat, starting with Peking Duck:
After all, this was Thanksgiving. See those french fries above? I arrived early and started with that delicacy so that I could drink my wine. We went on to:
- steamed choy sum with oyster sauce
- ong choy
- eggplant with garlic sauce
- honey walnut shrimp
- volcano pork chops
- Hong Kong style seafood mixed vegetables
- special fried rice
- steamed branzino (which certainly looked like mullet to me)
Branzino is a European sea bass farmed in Connecticut. It has recently become a well-regarded fish in high cuisine restaurants. Swai, from Thailand, is a fraud fish with some dangers.
The turkey special for the night would have cost us around $180. The whole meal only came up to $177. What, however, made the gathering special were the wines, and the conviviality they generated. I brought two of my Stanford wines, thinking that was, maybe, one bottle too many. Little Village has a corkage charge of $1/glass. You can have ten drinks and the cost is still $1.
Turns out Yasuo brought three bottles, and we opened all five. Dan was the designated driver and had two ounces all night. That calculates to just about one bottle per person.
Clearly, they're foodies, for their familiarity with Michelin 3-star and Pelligrino Best 50 was obvious. We also talked about BTS, Rain and Gangnam, for the three ladies are from Seoul and Dan spent a few years there. Yasuo, an electrical engineer, is from Japan, but lived in San Jose and now is from Los Angeles. This restaurant must be popular with international bridge players, for they saw a couple of friends with even more points than them. They all loved this dinner so much that they plan to return next Sunday. The tournament goes on for another week.
So Friday night after walking 18-holes at Ala Wai, I had my 15 Craigside turkey meal, which also served as tailgate #1. The game on TV was in a snowstorm, where Washington beat Washington State:
Note the bottle of 2002 Ventana Estate Chardonnay. I wondered what this cost, and the best I could do was find a 2014 Chardonnay for $150. I have never before tasted a 16-year old Chardonnay. The nose was crisp without any offending odor. There was no hint of corkiness (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) or spoilage.
Tailgate #2 was my best brunch tailgate ever, with most of the ingredients coming from Marukai. I wanted to test the severity of Black Friday, so, after golf, went there and found no parking problem. Then, for the first time that I can remember, went straight to check-out without any line. This was the day when you could use the scratch-off sent through the mail, and I got a 10% discount.
Of the three, which do you think is the most expensive? If those shiitake mushrooms were matsutake, then, perhaps. However, no matsutake. So my brunch tailgate:
That bowl to the left is my aquarium:
I reprised the Ventana Chardonnay, a junmai daiginjo sake and Kirin beer:
My aloe has a tall blossom:
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Typhoon Usagi is headed for Vietnam:
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