Food Porn for Thought

Yesterday BMW & I celebrated our three year anniversary by going to dinner at a four-star place in Tribeca. We both dressed up for the occasion, and he even wore a suit and got his hair cut! He was so smooth that he even had a special flower arrangement delivered to the restaurant and placed at our table. However, people say that after a while, the romance tends to fade; appropriately, we were joking the other day about how sometimes it feels like forever that we've been together, especially when we get into the habit of nagging each other.

"God, it feels like we're married," I told him this past weekend, laughing. I found it funny because that's not at all what I envision my future marriage to be like. I always say how I don't want to have a marriage like my parents did, one filled with yelling and fighting. In fact, AP & I were just talking about wives who gripe about having sex with their husbands. Why the hell would you marry someone you didn't want to have sex with? And if you did want to be intimate with that person at one point, why wouldn't you try to maintain feelings you once had for each other?

It was with this attitude that I went into our anniversary dinner--that is, the attitude of "I'm not going to stop working on something I love." That means I'm going to tell him when he pisses me off, admit when I'm wrong, and try and focus on something I can do for him everyday, rather than focusing on what he can do for me.

So, it is with these thoughts in mind that I give to you some porn--I mean food--for thought, our dinner at Bouley last night:

Warning: Pictures are fuzzy because we had to turn the flash off. I didn't want to annoy our French waitstaff at BMW's plebeian desire to photograph every single course.

Our waiter, or one of the seven waitstaff we had (yes, seven), came around with an antique bread cart and handed us a warm baguette and an apple-cinnamon roll. And then he came around later and let us pick from the cart which type of bread we wanted--he was the modern adult's version of the Ice Cream Man. I stared at the breads as he sliced off a piece for BMW, practically drooling and immediately regretting my "no thank you" to more bread. So he asked me again, and I took a piece of the fig bread over the walnut-saffron. It was orgasmic.

Another waiter brought us an amuse-bouche of gazpacho with shrimp beneath an apple sorbet. It was even better than it sounds, with melt-in-your-mouth flavors both sweet and savory, the tartness of the apple an exemplary of the perfect sweet-to-sour ratio (right).

For our appetizers, BMW shared bites of his chilled Maine lobster, mango, and artichoke mezzaluna wrapped in Serrano ham and drizzled with a passion fruit, coconut and tamarind dressing.

I hoarded most of my hamachi and melon deliciousness, but I gave a few bites to him to be fair.
We asked our cute sommelier to recommend wine for our main courses and his face lit up. He selected a cabernet from Alexander valley in California which was nothing short of incredible.

BMW ordered the baby pig, milk-fed with a diet of organic apples and grass only, the menu claims (shut up, vegetarians--it was juicy and delicious). I had the most perfectly cooked duck, smothered in a honey-vanilla glaze and I wanted to cream my pants, it was so good.

After dinner, a waitress brought us a palate cleanser from the kitchen, a sorbet of pineapple and coconut with passion fruit sauce. With our dessert they brought us lychee ice cream with crystallized raspberry at the bottom. After our desserts (I had the Chocolate Frivolous, a plate of miniature desserts including a toasted hazelnut wafer, chocolate brûlée, a Valrhona chocolate soufflé, chocolate parfait rolled in soybean powder and pine nut praline ice cream; BMW had Chocolate Brioche with espresso anglaise, dulce de leche, a saffron tuile and prune armagnac ice cream), they brought us a plate of mini pastries--in case we weren't already full.
On our way out, they reminded me to take my flowers, and even gave us a load of lemon-tea bread from their bakery as a way of thanking us for coming. I ate it for breakfast this morning and relished the meal and its accompanying resolutions, planning to have our next celebration at another one of David Bouley's restaurants.