devouring menu

Photo courtesy of Emily Wilson.

Tuesday was a good day. I saw a taping of Last Call with Carson Daly. The guests were Mark Burnett, the boss Tony Danza, some comedian whose name escapes me and I can’t seem to find online, and Matt Pond PA. I was on Matt Pond’s list so the seats were great (I was the +1). Two items of note: they film the show in the same studio they film Saturday Night Live in and C.Daly looks exactly like what you think he looks like. During the band’s performance they have everyone move over to the music stage — the same stage SNL uses — so you can pretend to be at a rock show. I wasn’t feeling my rockingest due to Formal Tuesdays coat n’ tie mandate and being in the front row. (Vinod invented office Formal Tuesdays so he could wear his custom made Hong Kong suits more often.) You just cannot rock-out in a tie, it’s science, you can’t argue with it.

The show airs Friday, Feb 18th real late at night.

Matt Pond has a new EP out featuring a cover of Holiday Road by Lindsey Buckingham — you know, the song from the Vacation movie. Here’s the iTunes link. Funny story about that song: My brother Kevin and I liked that song a lot. We rented the movie, but wanted to capture the tune before we had to return it. This was before the days when electronic equipment had abundant inputs and outputs so we resorted to holding the video-camera up to the TV and exploiting the “analog hole”.

On to San Domenico’s on Central Park South for a special chef’s tasting menu. Out came: Scallops | ravioli stuffed with a soft boiled egg, spinach and ricotta | gorgonzola risotto | chilean sea bass | venison | three desserts and a wine selected specifically for each course. I don’t think I really grasped the concept of “tasting menus” and pretty much woofed down each course in its entirety. Reservations were an early-bird 7pm, but that didn’t stop the digestion process from waking me up at 2:30am with a blood sugar rush that kept me pacing my apartment until 4:30am.