Room Service Ahoy

Yaargh mateys, 'tis time for some roomservice fit for a pirate. My boss and I decided against walking around in gale force winds to find a restaurant, and I knew no one in their right mind would seat me in the hotel restaurant, so I ordered room service and watched Good Eats instead. I was surprised.

This is justification after someone (British no less) made fun of my canapes last night...

I don't eat meat, it has been a year since I've had even chicken. I decided not to tempt fate too much and just ordered (safety) chicken, I wasn't disappointed.

The executive chef here, Justin Leboe is a rookie, starting roughly last May or so. Here is a good writeup of some of the interesting first Trial by Fire when the only power plant on the island was "temporarily offline" (read huge explosion that made our hosting provider run off generators for several weeks after).

Evidently, he's a capable triathlete(team stats, 12th place, he's the fast one) as well, which seems incongruous with the "image" of a chef. (Flay's Boobies, Bourdain's self-poisoning, Todd English's barely contained psychopathy, that thing).

Anyway, I'll start it off:

Pan fried chicken, creamy polenta, mushrooms, fava beans, endives and an asparagus tip or two.

You can see I didn't use my soup spoon to eat my soup, because I don't think I could have fit that monster in my pie hole. I think people were actually much larger than we are back in the olden days. The soup was a potato soup with some croutons, which I didn't bother to take a picture of, because, well, white soup, white bowl, any New Englander can tell what this will look like anyway, etc.

Dessert, needs no explanation, mousse, cake, ganache, berries, you do the math, I might die soon. I did like the almond cookie basket for the strawberries, less like a fortune cookie than I anticipated.

Gone in 60 seconds:

Yes, I waited until I was finished with my meal before I touched my beer. I didn't want some skunky third rate brew anaesthetizing my palate.

I wish that meal could have lasted much longer. I would totally buy a bucket of Chef Leboe's chicken :-) I think that it's easy to lose sight of how good this stuff can be if you eat it all the time, like if I had had a Wendy's Spicy Chicken sandwich yesterday at the airport, this might not have been such a big deal to me. At least this chicken has some dignity on my plate even if she didn't while she was being de-beaked and having her legs chopped off. Or maybe she was free range? Let's go with that, it was a free range chicken. Heh.

Free range macerated strawberries too.

I can't wait to go to Europe next month and sample over there too.