Text 19019, 88 rader
Skriven 2014-11-05 12:04:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: Aug trip end 217
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Rosemary picked me up, and we cast about for lunch. I
expressed an interest in shellfish - after all, there is
this big old bay right nearby, so we headed off in the
general direction of Matunuck. Along the way we noticed
that a formerly vacant storefront had morphed into a
restaurant called O Sushi, and on the spur of the moment
we decided to pull in.

It's decorated or sort of undecorated in the minimalist
style that has become fashionable, with exposed ductwork,
walls painted in some brooding color but otherwise blank,
and so on. Metal chairs, hard tabletops - all apparently
designed to increase noise and thus remedy the nonexistent
excitement of the place.

The staff are Asian, but what kind of Asian I wasn't sure
of. They were pleasant, sightly, and willing but also
apparently unconnected with the food. College kids, not
chefs and professional waiters.

We started with a somewhat tasteless miso soup about which
the less said the better. This was made up for by a salad
of the usual iceberg sort judiciously sauced with a
particularly punchy Japanese dressing.

Rosemary's sashimi lunch special was of reasonably abundant
quite fresh fish, an unimaginative assortment of salmon,
tuna, fluke, and white tuna. I got the sushi special, the
same fish, a tolerable quantity of too-thin slices topping
rather big gross blobs of (decent) rice. The gari and soy
were commercial, the wasabi was crap.

I also had a side order of akagai, to at least get a tiny
amount of shellfish; this was good but again shaved too
thin given the size of the rice balls.

Too much sustenance for her, not quite enough for me, a
buck difference.


-

The evening was taken up with the local historical society's
cocktail party to kick off its house tour. Heavy appetizers
were promised; they were decent but of insufficient quantity
(there were substantial numbers of non-RSVPing members, good
for revenue, bad for catering) and tending to include
undisclosed blue cheese in the assorted dips, squirts, and
blobs that went atop or beneath or alongside the lobster,
mushrooms, and rare roast beef that bypassed me altogether
too frequently. The provisioners were not at all bad, just
a bit one-trick-ponyish and unprepared for the crowd.

The people whose home had been appropriated for the event
outdid themselves - the woman of the house, an internist by
day, apparently is a demon baker by night and provided
cakes and cookies that exceeded the catering company's
efforts in both quality and quantity. There are only so many
sweets you can ingest, but thank goodness for them and the
open bar (Gosling's was the best thing on offer, so fake
dark and stormys were the source of most of my calories this
evening).

-

The house tour next day was an amusement. I did a quick run
of the properties (all turn of the century, semi-historic,
and heavily and generally elegantly renovated) before
settling down to my task, which was serving as assistant
ticket-taker at one of the houses that was in the middle of
the tour, which meant of course that the money had been
collected and hands stamped and brochures given out to all
the visitors at previous venues. We did exactly zero business
throughout the afternoon, our only function being to check
that everybody showed us their hand stamp, and I can't see
that far anyhow. My coworker and I spent most of the time
telling tired old jokes and bemoaning that we had not brought
a cooler of beers to entertain us.

The last time I'd performed this useful function at one of
these events, I'd been stationed right at the beginning of
the tour so was kept busy: this time not so much.

After this, a week in Williamsport, at which nothing
culinarily interesting happened, then back to Washington.
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